The Whip - Catherine Cookson

Emma Molinero’s dying father, a circus performer, he’d sent his beloved daughter to live with an unknown grandmother, no realising the he had sentenced her to a life of misery.

But the graceful Emma, mistrusted by the local people for her beauty and her ‘foreign blood’, nevertheless became a woman who mystified and fascinated men because of her fiery independence and her skill at performing with the whip – her father’s only legacies.