Josephine Cox

Josephine Cox was a beloved British saga novelist whose warm, dramatic stories of working-class life in Lancashire sold over twenty million copies worldwide. Born in Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1938, she was one of ten children and grew up in poverty. She left school at fifteen and worked in factories and shops before studying for a teaching degree as a mature student and eventually becoming a full-time writer. Cox published over sixty novels, many set in the Lancashire mill towns and industrial communities she knew from her childhood. The Broken Man continues her tradition of emotionally powerful family sagas about ordinary people facing extraordinary challenges. Her fiction was characterised by its warmth, its understanding of working-class life, and its celebration of the resilience and strength of women who keep families together through hardship. She died in 2020 at the age of eighty-two. Her audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers the comfort of classic Lancashire saga — stories of love, loss, and family told with genuine warmth by someone who grew up in the communities she wrote about.