Mary Hocking: 24 books

As a child of seven, Richard of York, the future King Richard the Third, watched an even younger child coping determinedly with a large boarhound. Never again was Richard to have so clear a view of Henry Tudor, who, twenty-six years later, was to cost him his crown and his life at the Battle of Bosworth...

'What's so special about a son? Why doesn't she care about her daughters?' Mary Hocking brings good humour and sympathy to her depiction of the Fairley sisters growing up in their close-knit West London neighbourhood before, during and after the war. Here, in the first novel of a trilogy, the...

It is 1939, and great changes come running to meet them all, snatching at their innocence and steadfast convictions and tossing them far away. Alice, Ben and Guy travel overseas, serving in the same war but on very different battlegrounds. For those who stay behind, Judith, Louise, Claire and Daphne,...

In this haunting novel, echoing mystery play and fairy tale, a family is forced to confront the grievances and emotional confusions of their shared past. In the very dead of winter they assemble at a remote country cottage enveloped by snow. Ostensibly they are celebrating Christmas, but festivities...

A Time of War offers a first-hand looks at the dangers, loves and everyday dramas of a Fleet Air Arm Training centre. Set in the West Country, it give a Wren's- eye view of the WWII - following a group of young women as they enter the services world. Mary Hocking's novel explores the gossip, the parties,...

Today I saw the strange woman again. For I am sure this poor ghost is, in fact, a woman. It is true she is dressed as a man, though no man I ever saw dressed in quite this fashion . . . When Clarice Mitchell arrives at an isolated farmhouse to rehearse a production of Pericles, she leaves the...

Their family has always been a living thing, its members encompassing supporting each other, confident in the indestructible bond of kinship. Murdoch and Janet Saunders, Hugh, Stephanie, Katrina, Malcolm, and Humphrey the dog. Murdoch stands at the head of the family, a highly respected novelist....

The arrival of a mysterious new psychiatrist at March House, the psychiatric clinic where Ruth works, heralds the collapse of her entire world. Dr Laver is flamboyant, vulgar, possibly even unethical - but he starts Ruth on an uneasy journey through the past, in which she glimpses her parents for...

The parishioners of a small West Country market town are uncertain what to make of their new Anglican vicar with his candlelit processions. And, though Michael Hoath embraces challenge, his enthusiasm is sapped by their dogged traditionalism. Moreover, Valentine's imperial temperament is more suited...

When President Aluwawa purges his country of foreign helpers Daniel Kerr, a micro-biologist, returns to Yeominster, feeling displaced and dispossessed. Yet he has a family there. His wife, Erica, more used to his absence than his presence, and two children, Emma and Giles. But family togetherness...

A Time of War told the story of a group of Wrens on a West Country airfield, but now the war is over, the girls are dispersed, and must learn to endure the rigours of the early post-war years, as well as the boredoms and perplexities of civilian life. While Kerren takes a job as a librarian...

The conflict between personal responsibility towards individuals and concern for which is no less forceful today than when Mary Hocking wrote this novel. The Winter City is set in an Iron-curtain country where the people are on the point of rising against their Communist government. Widowed...

This is the story of how a trivial event may be inflated by press, television and mere gossip into a national scandal. A small boy falls off a climbing frame in his school playground: though he is hardly at all injured, his mother accuses the headmaster of negligence. Soon the County Education...

When Matthew Vereker arrives from the American Mid-West on a year's exchange as vicar of All Hallows on Helmsley Island, he thinks there are no people in England, but only 'members of classes dying behind their stockades'. He soon finds that the reality is more complicated. Helmsley Island, once known...