Allen & Unwin The Gingerbread Girl book Fiction English Paperback 368 pages

A Christmas novel from the Queen of family saga, Sheila Newberry.

All she wanted was a home for Christmas.London, 1936.Ill and stuck in hospital at Christmas, seven-year-old Cora Kelly is excited to receive a visit from her mother, who brings her the gift of a gingerbread man. But little does Cora know that this will be the last time she sees her...As Cora continues her recovery on a farm in the beautiful Norfolk countryside, tragedy strikes her family and she moves back to London with her new guardian, Eliza. Here they live a happy, if simple, life. But as the Second World War approaches and the past comes knocking, everything changes. Will Cora be able to escape the inevitable, or is she destined to repeat her parents' mistakes?

Sheila Newberry was born in Suffolk and spent a lot of time there both before and during the war. She wrote her first 'book' before she was ten - all sixty pages of it - in purple ink. Her family has certainly been her inspiration and she has been published most of her adult life. She spent forty years living in Kent with her husband John on a smallholding, and has nine children and twenty-two lively grandchildren. They retired back to Suffolk where Sheila still lives today.