Margaret Dickinson's new novel

FORGIVE AND FORGET

Polly Longden’s china-doll looks belie a strong and fiery personality.  When typhoid strikes her home city of Lincoln, she will need every ounce of that strength in order to cope.  With the death of her mother, thirteen-year-old Polly has to give up her ambition of becoming a teacher to care for her grieving father and her younger brothers and sisters.  It’s a daunting task: twelve-year-old Eddie is wayward and difficult, and Violet, at ten, shows signs of rebellion. 

When their father, too, falls victim to the typhoid, his only hope is to go to hospital, leaving Polly to cope alone.  Thankfully, she has the support of kind neighbours, Bertha Halliday and her son, Leo, a young policeman.

Through all the hardships that follow, Polly is sustained by her dream of becoming Leo’s wife.  But her father’s hot temper leads him to the wrong side of the law during the railway riots of 1911, forcing Leo to take drastic action that Polly will surely never be able to forgive and forget…

Signing Events 2011

Friday 4th March WHSmith, Skegness 9.30am – 11.30am

WHSmith, Boston 2.00pm – 3.30pm

Saturday 5th March Waterstone’s, Lincoln 11.00am – 1.00pm

WHSmith, Lincoln 2.00pm – 3.30pm

Wednesday 9th March Waterstone’s, Boston 10.30am – 12.00pm

Oldrids, Boston 12.30pm – 2.00pm

Friday 11th March WHSmith, Grantham 10.30am – 12.00pm

Downtown, Grantham 1.00pm – 3.00pm

Saturday 12th March WHSmith, Grimsby 10.30am – 12.00pm

Waterstone’s, Grimsby 2.00pm – 3.00pm

Tuesday 15th March WHSmith, Gainsborough 10.30am – 12.30pm

WHSmith, Retford 2.00pm – 3.00pm

Wednesday 16th March WHSmith, Louth 10.00am – 11.30am

MSR NEWS 12.00pm – 1.00pm

Thursday 17th March Perkins, Horncastle 10.00am – 11.30am

Coningsby Bookshop 1.00pm – 2.30pm

Saturday 19th March WHSmith, Newark 10.30am – 12.30pm

Monday 21st March Walkers Bookshop, Sleaford 11.00am – 1.00pm

Thursday 24th March WHSmith Harrogate 11.30am – 2.00pm

Friday 25th March WHSmith Scarborough 11.30am – 2.00pm

Saturday 26th March WHSmith, Meadowhall 11.00am – 3.00pm

Tuesday 29th March Bookmark, Spalding 10.30am – 1.00pm

Friday 1st April Walkers Bookshop, Stamford 10.30am – 12pm

Walkers Bookshop, Bourne 1.30pm – 3.00pm

Saturday 2nd April WH Smith Beverley 11.00am – 1.00pm

Margaret Dickinson

Born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, Margaret Dickinson has spent most of her life in the county, moving to the East Coast from Nottinghamshire at the age of seven.  She began writing at the age of fourteen with the ambition to be in print and her first novel was published in 1968 when she was twenty-six.  Seven others followed this between 1969 and 1984 but then, because of family commitments, Margaret was unable to write for seven years.  In 1991, encouraged by her husband to begin writing again, Margaret had that little piece of luck that everyone needs - she found a wonderful agent, Darley Anderson, who advised her to write a regional saga with a strong woman as the central character.

In 1993 Pan Macmillan offered a two-book contract for Plough the Furrow, the first in the Fleethaven Trilogy, and its sequel, Sow the Seed, which were published in 1994 and 1995 respectively.  It seemed as if Margaret had found her niche; writing romantic fiction and bringing to life her love of the sea, the Lincolnshire landscape and its people.  Reap the Harvest, published in 1996, completed the trilogy.  Church Farm Museum at Skegness - a “living” museum - was the model for Brumbys’ Farm and the setting was Gibraltar Point.

In 1997 The Miller’s Daughter, inspired by the windmill at Burgh-le-Marsh, near Skegness, was published and in the following year Chaff Upon the Wind took the Manor House at Alford as the setting for the characters in the story.  Grimsby was the inspiration for The Fisher Lass, evoking the dramas of those who are born to the fishing way of life and described by the publishers as ‘...a love story as powerful and restless as the mighty North Sea.’  This was published in 1999.  Spalding and district was the setting for The Tulip Girl published in August 2000 and The River Folk, inspired by Margaret’s birthplace, Gainsborough, was published on 22nd June 2001. 

Tangled Threads, a story with the Nottinghamshire framework knitting and lace industries in the early 1900s as the setting was published in May 2002 and its sequel in 2003, Twisted Strands, followed the lives of the same characters affected by the Great War.  Margaret’s novel for 2004, Red Sky in the Morning, returned to the Lincolnshire Wolds and evoked the era of the Second World War and its aftermath. 

The Workhouse Museum at Southwell in Nottinghamshire was the inspiration for Without Sin, published in April 2005.  As always, Margaret’s characters and storylines are completely fictitious, though the background research at the museum was fascinating.

Pauper’s Gold, published in April 2006, is an emotional story of love and survival, set in a Derbyshire cotton mill and the silk town of Macclesfield. In the 1850s life was harsh for the pauper apprentices, children taken from workhouses and bound to their masters for years.  And, with the onset of the American civil war, a cotton famine caused greater hardship in the mills of England.

Wish Me Luck, published by Macmillan and Pan Books in April 2007, is set in Lincolnshire during World War II.  The shout line on the book cover says it all:  "Love and Laughter, Tears and Courage in a Time of War".

Sing As We Go, published in March 2008, again has the Second World War as its setting and is the story of a girl who, after tragedy and heartbreak, joins a concert party to entertain troops, hospitals and war workers.

Wherever Margaret travels, she is never “off duty” when it comes to finding ideas for her novels.  On her first-ever trip abroad in 2004 to Davos, in Switzerland, which in the early part of the twentieth century was a centre for the treatment of tuberculosis, Margaret found fascinating information that led to writing Suffragette Girl.  The story begins and ends with the heroine, Florrie, in Davos, but in between she becomes a suffragette, a VAD nurse in the front line in the Great War and even takes part in the General Strike of 1926.

Margaret’s novel for 2010, Sons and Daughters, is set in the flat marshland near the Lincolnshire coast; an area with its own unique ‘character’.

                      Charlotte, the heroine in Sons and Daughters, is treated very cruelly by her father, Osbert, who craved a son.  The only love and laughter at home is to be found in the farmhouse kitchen with the servants, Mary and Edward, and with the workmen on her father’s farm.  Though she doesn’t realise it at first, Charlotte is loved by everyone in the small community, especially by the children who attend her Sunday School.

                        It is only when a widower, Miles Thornton, and his three sons come to live at the Manor that Charlotte’s world is turned upside down and she begins to see that her life of duty and obedience to her father is not what it should be.  And then Osbert comes up with a preposterous suggestion that shocks Charlotte and all those who care about her.

To celebrate the Millennium, Margaret was invited by the Skegness Playgoers to write a community play.  Embracing Tides, featuring the life of a fictional family throughout the twentieth century in Skegness, was staged at the Embassy Theatre, Skegness, on 23rd, 24th and 25th November, 2000, and also on 1st December as the Playgoers’ entry for that year’s Play Festival.  The production won five of the Festival’s thirteen awards.

Margaret still lives in Lincolnshire.  She has been married to Dennis for over forty four years and has two grown-up daughters and is now a proud Grannie.

Thank you for visiting my website

Best wishes

Margaret Dickinson

Margaret Dickinson's novels are published in paperback by   Pan Books