'Me da's a grand man!' Mary Ann Shaughnessy has spoken; question her who dare. For although Mary Ann may look quite an ordinary small girl from a dockland tenement, always hot in defense of a ne'er-do-well father, she is in fact a one-man army, armoured with faith and possessed of formidable qualities. Set on Tyneside, the part of the world which Catherine Cookson knew and understood so well, this heartwarming and humorously observed book skillfully weds an authentic and unsentimentalized background to the kind of fairytale story that we all like to believe could come true and which the Mary Ann Shaughnessys of this world know to be true. The moral of A Grand Man is simply that faith can move mountains, but the delight of the book lies in the telling and in the character of its heroine as she battles, connives, and bargains to get a better way of life for those she loves and especially for the 'grand man' himself. A Grand Man is the first of the Mary Ann stories and was made into a film, Jacqueline, in 1954.

As has been said before, Mary Ann Shaughnessy is no ordinary child. She first won a place in the hearts of thousands of readers in A Grand Man, described by Alan Melville in a broadcast as “a quite enchanting novel, written by someone who obviously knows the mind of a child as well as she knows the mean back streets of Tyneside.†Mary Ann firmly believed that when her father took on the farm job she had largely contrived to find for him, he would be set for life. Away from the temptations of the town, doing the kind of work he was meant for, he must slowly but surely turn into the angelic being Mary Ann knew him to be. But Mary Ann did not count on the frailties of human nature nor the sheer contrariness of others, which destroyed all her well-laid plans… In this second novel of the Shaughnessy saga, Mary Ann returns in this delightful, warm-hearted and humorously observed story of life set in northern England.

When Mary Ann is sent from her native Tyneside to become a pupil at a high-class convent boarding school on the South Coast, the idea in her benefactor’s mind was that she should be turned into a little lady. In this, the third story in the Mary Ann series, Mary Ann is seen again as that irrepressible child of Tyneside in all her cheeky delightfulness. As usual, however, despite the seemingly over-powering difficulties, everything is sorted out satisfactorily in the end.

Her expensive convent education hadn't changed Mary Ann Shaughnessy one little bit. Sure, she could come over all refined when she had to, but who'd want to talk ever so nice on a farm? But in other respects she was growing up fast. As Mary Ann began to learn about the feelings of adults, so could she see that the more they loved someone, the more they could hurt and be hurt. And it wasn't just grown-ups who felt this way either. With something of a start, she realised that - whenever she caught sight of Corny Boyle - she could recognise those same feeling swelling up inside herself.

In the fifth of the series, Mary Ann discovers that life is indeed a sad and funny affair. In her attempts to come to grips with the painful business of growing up she is hard pressed, but nevertheless determined, to remain her old irrepressable self.

Mary Ann is now engaged to be married and the wedding is to take place in a few week's time. But Mary Ann still manages to become involved in the knotty problems of those dear to her and sets out to solve them in her own inimitable manner.

The mischievous six-year-old twins of Mary Ann and Corny Boyle become more and more difficult to handle as their parents agree less and less on the best way to deal with them

The story of Mary Ann and her trials as her husband and twins decide they want to adopt a little bull terrier. But this is insignificant compared with her next ordeal when a blonde comes into her husband's life