From the best-selling author of The Slum Angel. After losing her father, Thea Goodson is alone in the world. She has a husband. But Ernie is a brutal man who uses his fists to keep Thea in line. And besides, Ernie Goodson has secrets – secrets that even his wife cannot share. And yet in Victorian Yorkshire, appearances are everything - and they must be maintained whatever the cost. Thea has no choices but to cover up her bruises with powder and keep a forced smile on her face while she looks after Ernie’s home and tobacco shop.

Wakefield 1870. On the banks of the River Calder, Meg Taylor struggles to care for her younger siblings and sick mother whilst her father is away working as a boatman on the canals. The slums where they live are rife with disease, and Meg longs for a different life, away from the grinding poverty, but she'll never leave her family. But with the canals slowly dying as trade moves to the railways, and with Meg’s father stubbornly holding onto the past, Meg fears her family’s future is going to get even bleaker. If only there was a way she could save them.

Hampshire, 1913. Amidst the glitz and glamour of England’s High Society, Sarah Trenwith is more of a wallflower living in the shadow of her beautiful sister Marianne. But as the war approaches Sarah will have to step out of the place society and her family have assigned her if she’s to do her part and claim the love she always dreamed of from afar.

With the country on the brink of war, single mother Jean embraces her ten-year-old daughter, Valerie, before she puts her on a train to Somerset alongside hundreds of other evacuees. Jean’s heart breaks as she vows they’ll be together again soon, knowing it’s a promise she might not be able to keep. Wrenched away from her mother and everything familiar, Valerie arrives in Somerset and nervously waits in the village hall to find a host family.

When the Jewish families of Berlin start disappearing in nightly raids, 21-year-old Jacob Kagan knows it’s only a matter of time before the trucks come for him. Along with his family and best friend, he flees the country he’s always called home to find shelter in a Dutch refugee camp. Before long, the Netherlands falls to the Nazi war machine - Jacob’s new home is transformed into a transit camp with weekly trains bound for the horrors of the Eastern concentration camps.