Runaway
Will he ever find what he's looking for?
Oliver Wainwright is still a boy when he first sets eyes on the fair, delicate Florence – the aristocratic granddaughter of Sir Philip Oldfield. And, determined never to be a servant or follow in his father’s footsteps as a quarry worker on the Oldfield estate, he runs away to Middlefield, that very day.
Slowly but surely, he sets about becoming a man of property and a cotton industry king. He works single-mindedly to achieve his ambition – until he meets Rosie, a married mill hand who distracts him with her dark, warm beauty. Has Oliver finally found what he really wanted all along?
Set against a background of the Lancashire/Cheshire cotton industry, The Runaway is a magnificent saga of a young man’s rise to power, his passion and poverty, feuds and triumphs and the two very different women who shape his life.
Audrey Reimann was brought up in Macclesfield where she was educated at the Macclesfield Grammar School for Girls. She and her husband now live in East Lothian.
Audrey has three children and is the proud grandmother of ten, and has been variously a bank clerk, a nurse, a teacher, and a foster mother to twenty-five. But, above all, Audrey is a storyteller. On Anne Robinson's BBC Two programme 'My Life in Books', comedian Sarah Millican named Audrey's novel Flora's War as one of her favourite books, saying: 'This is a book that will make you laugh and make you cry.'