Books by Evelyn Hood

Another superb saga from Sunday Times bestselling author Evelyn Hood. Rachel Carswell is at her father's funeral when she learns she's adopted, news that shakes her formerly serene life to the very core. Confused by the revelation and devastated by grief, Rachel needs a distraction. Much against the wishes of her husband and her adoptive mother, she starts the search for her roots and discovers she has a twin sister, Clara.Cara is the woman Rachel could have been, given a different upbringing. While Rachel's staid husband and her adoptive mother, try to cope with the sudden intrusion of Cara and her easy-going, attractive husband Angus into their lives, Rachel and Cara search for their biological mother.

In a decade of peace and change, uncomfortable new conflicts are looming. Paisley, 1920. Fiona MacDowall has made it clear she intends to inherit her father's furniture emporium. Her half-brother Alex has other ideas, but it's Alex's wife Rose who objects most. Rose is a businesswoman in her own right, running Harlequin, the town's grandest and most successful dressmaker's. She is sure Fiona will stop at nothing to get what she wants, and Rose suspects that includes her own business. But there are bigger troubles on the horizon for the inhabitants of Paisley. When Irish cabinetmaker Joe McCart arrives with his family and a dark secret in tow, the community is left reeling.

The eve-of-performance dress rehearsal of Henry''s send-up of a Victorian tragedy is running anything but smoothly as the cast constantly step out of character to bicker. Feuds simmer beneath the surface and the pretty heroine cannot remember her lines! However, when all seems lost, and the play likely to be cancelled, the cast rally like true troopers for "the show must go on"!|4 women, 2 men

Following her husband Kenneth McAdam's suicide, Isla meets his daughter by his first marriage, and finds that Kenneth had never divorced his first wife. Left with nothing, Isla and her two young children move to a seedy tenement building and she sets about improving it - and herself.

When, after serving in World War II, her grandson Joe Scott refuses to return to Barrneuk, the small farm his family has managed for three generations on the Clyde island of Bute, Celia Scott is furious.Celia kept the farm going after the premature death of her husband and has had to keep running it into her old age, as well as raising her three grandchildren after their mother died and their father, heartbroken, left the island. She and her granddaughter Jenny have had a hard time maintaining it during the war, with a little help from Iain, her oldest grandson. Iain was to have inherited the farm, but after he was crippled in a rail accident in 1939 Joe became the natural successor. Now, his refusal to take on Barrneuk has thrown the family into turmoil, ruining each family member's plans for the future. Celia's first instinct is to let the farm go but Jenny has other ideas and so she must convince Iain that he can take on the inheritance that is rightly his.

The lives and personalities of all the tenants living the Paisley tenement building in 1941 couldn't be more different, but they are all interconnected. Ellen and Donnie Borland renounced their respective Protestant and Catholic religions to marry for love. Older now, Ellen misses her faith while working hard to support her lazy husband. Julia and Frank McCosh are musicians who entertain the other tenants with their rehearsals. Celia Goudie is a young bride whose husband is in the air force. Her bus conductress job gives strength and power to a quiet, shy girl. Denis Megson forgoes university to look after his family upon his father's death. Lena Fulton is terrified of her husband being killed in the war and sinks into a deep depression upon the loss of her baby. All of the tenants are concerned with the threat of the war going on around them, but little do they realise that the most immediate danger comes from within, in the shape of the depressed Lena.

After the death of his wife, Hamilton Forsyth scandalises the small Ayrshire town of Saltcoats by departing for pastures unknown. His three adult children are left reeling with shock - and with the family ironmongery shop to run. Walter, son and heir, looks set to manage the business and marry the suitable Clarissa Pinkerton but drops a bombshell on his sisters by saying he's going to marry the housemaid Sarah who is pregnant. Unable to tolerate the housemaid becoming mistress of their house, the girls find there are few choices within their social structure. Reluctantly, Belle moves in with her meddling Aunt Beatrice. Tarred with the brush of her brother's behaviour and thwarted in love, Morna moves down the social scale and into a boarding house. Gradually, she finds her feet, a job as a teacher - and an interest in the suffragette movement. Belle's main interest lies elsewhere - with Samuel Gilmartin, an attractive rogue with a head for business and an eye for the main change. She in turn scandalises society by marrying him...

ANOTHER DAY - Eighteen years after being disowned by her father for falling pregnant, Kirsty Lennox returns to Paisley determined to lay to rest the ghosts of the past. However, Kirsty's new life brings her a steady stream of troubles as she has to endure the jelousy her inheritance attracts from the townsfolk, her husband Matt's crippling illness, the constant squabbling of her sons and the tragedy that accompanies one snowy February day.

Elizabeth Cunningham is seventeen years old when Adam Montgomery returns to his father's house. An orphanage girl, she has long kept house for the high-handed Rab Montgomery and his two other sons. But when Adam enters their lives, rejecting his father's demands to enter the family shawl manufacturing business, she knows everything is about to change...

Jenny Gillespie has suffered her share of troubles during the Great War, not least the loss of her fiance, Robert Archer. For although Robert was not killed in action he is as dead to her as any sweetheart slaughtered in France when he eventually meets another woman. Jenny, meanwhile, is trapped in Clydeside's dockland, unable to leave her mother, who is worn out and heartbroken. Jenny has little choice but to abandon her dream of making a new start in Glasgow and return to her job in the tracing office of Dalkieth's shipyard and the domination of her relentlessly demanding family. Unexpectedly, Robert Archer returns to Clydeside and becomes Jenny's boss. Single again, penitent and seemingly eager to rekindle his relationship with Jenny, Robert would offer her a way out of the dead end she finds herself in. But Jenny, to her surprise, receives a proposal of marriage from a decent man, one that offers the obvious way to fulfil her duties to her family, escape from their cramped tenement home - and to forget Robert Archer forever. Perhaps only then, Jenny thinks, will she finally be able to reach out and grasp the handful of happiness she longs for...

Christian Knox is a girl who dreams - of a life beyond that of a Paisley housewife, of a world of learning beyond her Ladies' School, of possiblities her father dismisses as 'daft ideas'. But Christian is determined and when her father refuses to finance her education further she resolves to pay for it herself, by working as a tambourer, embroidering freelance for local textile manufacturers. Soon she's managing a group of Tambouring women on behalf of Paisley's biggest weavers, among them Angus Fraser, a man old enough to be her father but wise enough to appreciate her talents. Plunged into the fascinating world of Scotland's fledgling textile industry, Christian soon finds her combination of Lowland resolve and female flair begins to make its mark. And, in the shape of her greatest, most fought-for inspiration, the Paisley Shawl, it is a mark to be remembered for generations to come. . .

It is 1865 and Eppie, a young widow with a child to bring up, can't believe her luck when she gets the position of housekeeper to wealthy widower Alexander Geddes. He and his teenage son, Duncan, are a dream to work for, but daughter Lydia is moody, spoiled and temperamental - and convinced that Eppie has designs on Alexander. But Eppie is no gold-digger and Alexander Geddes has intentions that are purely honourable. Intentions that begin to lean in the direction of Lydia's governess - Eppie's sister Marion. Yet although the attraction is mutual, its development is slow. For there are other tensions not only in the household but also in the community. Refusing to train as a physician, Duncan is set on following his heart's desire, to side with his stepmother's kin and pursue his dreams of quarrying the precious local marble. Eppie, now almost a member of the family, feels partly responsible for the rift between father and son. She feels even more responsible when Duncan returns home with a stranger who has a mysterious past . . .