The Mallen Trilogy Author:Catherine Cookson Thomas Mallen of High Banks Hall had many sons, most of them bastards. But to alI of them he passed on his mark - a distinctive flash of white hair running to the left temple, and known as the Mallen Streak. It was said in the Northumberland countryside that those who bore the streak seldom reached old age or died in bed, and that nothing good e... more »ver came of a Mallen. Starting in 1851, this compulsively readable sequence of novels follows the stormy lives of the Mallens though succeeding generations, linking the England of Victoria with the dark days of the First World War. Collected together in one volume for the first time, Catherine Cookson's Mallen novels are richly entertaining tales of family life and relationships which touch the heart and offer much shrewd observation of the human condition.« less