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The Bad Penny
The Bad Penny
May 5, 2025 4:49 PM

Author:Katie Flynn

The Bad Penny

One wild night midwife Patty Peel is called to attend a birth on the opposite side of Liverpool. She pedals off into the storm and delivers a baby girl in a filthy slum dwelling, just as the mother dies. The drunk and violent father tells Patty to get rid of it, so she takes the child away, meaning to deliver it to the nearest orphanage.

But Patty had spent her entire childhood in an institution and cannot bear to hand the baby over. However, there are rough waters ahead. Patty has few friends, and fears and despises men, including her next door neighbour, Darky Knight, so how can she hope to bring up the child alone?

She has no idea how the baby will affect the attitude of those around her, nor how her life will change as a result...

The Bad Penny is a heartwarming tale of love and courage in hard times from the hugely popular storyteller Katie Flynn.

Reviews

Irresistibly seizes the imagination

—— Evening Standard

Combining the visceral pleasures of a thriller with the more intellectual excitements of a novel of ideas... Beautifully constructed...never less than engrossing

—— Sunday Telegraph

Vivid, admirably imagined, ultimately very moving...This is a novel of the very highest ambition...immediate, sensuous, beautiful

—— Alan Massie , Scotsman

Combines dazzling erudition with assured narrative skills to offer glimpses of some of history's darkest corners, and stark and timely challenges to the very notions of civilisation and progress

—— Independent on Sunday

A dazzling hall of mirrors... Ferociously ambitious... Illumined by a fizzing passion for the recondite

—— Daily Telegraph
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