Hettie of Hope Street

A breathtaking tale set in 1920s Liverpool and London of one girl’s determination to trace her roots, find true love and succeed in a world where obstacles lurk around every corner.

Hettie is an orphan, taken in by Ellie Pride and her husband to their Preston home and treated as one of the family. But she has never felt she truly belonged.

Hettie has a special gift - a beautiful singing voice - and on the cusp of womanhood, she makes a choice that will alter the course of her life. Amid the bright lights of Liverpool, she will follow her dreams.

But once there, the only way to survive is working in the kitchens of a restaurant. Until, by chance, she is heard singing by the owner...

Whisked to London, Hettie is thrown into a theatrical and colourful world but one with a dark side, its young inhabitants haunted by the horror of the First World War, and stalked by the fear of the Depression to come.

Then tragedy strikes, and Hettie must decide between her heart and her head, her duty and her desire...

Annie Groves was born and lived in the north-west of England all of her life. She was the author of the Pride family series, Ellie Pride, Connie’s Courage and Hettie of Hope Street, for which she drew upon her own family’s history, picked up from listening to her grandmother’s stories when she was a child. Her next set of novels was the World War II series Goodnight Sweetheart, Some Sunny Day, The Grafton Girls and As Time Goes By. These were followed by the Campion series, Across the Mersey, Daughters of Liverpool, The Heart of the Family, Where the Heart Is and When the Lights Go on Again, which are also based on recollections from members of her family, who come from the city of Liverpool. My Sweet Valentine follows on from Home for Christmas and London Belles and is the third in this series, which introduces a set of glorious characters living in Article Row in Holborn. Annie Groves, whose real name was Penny Halsall, also wrote under the name of Penny Jordan and was an international bestselling author of over 170 novels with sales of over 84 million copies. Sadly, Penny Halsall died in 2011. She left a wonderful legacy of heart-warming novels for many more fans to discover and she will be greatly missed by all who knew her. The final books in the Article Row series, Only a Mother Knows and A Christmas Promise, will be published posthumously in 2013.