A. J. Cronin

Destiny brings two lonely people together in this moving love story by A. J. Cronin, one of the master storytellers of our time. Doctor Harvey Leith, a brilliant research scientist, awakes from a drunken stupor to find himself aboard a liner bound for the romantic Canary Islands. His past life is in ruins, and his hopes for the future are...

Originally published in 1945, The Green Years is one of A. J. Cronin's best-loved novels. It tells the story of Robert Shannon, a young Irish Catholic boy, who, orphaned at the age of seven, is brought to live with his mother's estranged family in Scotland. As he grows up in a dour Presbyterian town, only his great-grandfather, an incorrigible, swaggering,...

The Keys of the Kingdom is the unforgettable story of the Reverend Francis Chisholm and his fight against the snares of the world he has given up. One of Cronin's most famous characters, we follow Chisholm from Scotland to China over the course of six decades as he tries to find the true path for himself and the church. Guided...

A soul-stirring novel of pride and greed, and its terrible retribution... When her father forced her to leave school, and cut off all her contact with the past and future, Mary Brodie's whole life became the narrow compass of her family's cold, comfortless house in a small Scottish town. Her mean and ambitious father tyrannized over his timid, obliging wife,...

The Stars Look Down was A. J. Cronin's fourth novel, published in 1935, and this tale of a North-Country mining family was a great favourite with his readers. Robert Fenwick is a miner, and so are his three sons. His wife is proud that all her four men go down the mines. But David, the youngest, is determined that somehow...