The Crimean war is raging a world away from London. Martha Lackland, Abel Lackland’s daughter, astonishes her family and friends by announcing her intention to go to the Crimea to work amongst the British soldiers. After the initial shock, her family rally round to help her raise money for food and medicines. Once in Scutari, Martha meets Florence Nightingale. She also meets a surgeon – the dashing Alexander Laurence and love grows between them amidst the devastation of war.

London in the Blitz. Poppy is a mature and capable woman. She struggles to enable her family to lead normal lives. The problems they create are known to all mothers-a daughter torn between two men and a difficult and headstrong stepdaughter. It is a time of fear and uncertainty but love and passion grow amidst the devastation.

Martha Lackland dies in 1905. Her great-niece, Letty attends the funeral. Here she meets Luke O'Hare, an aspiring actor with plans to start a theatre for the poor of London. Letty falls under the spell of Luke and his circle of Bohemian friends. In an attempt to establish her independence from her domineering family she runs away to help Luke and his friends set up the theatre. It is also a time of great change for women as the Suffragette movement presents a radical challenge to the established order and Letty is drawn to the excitement and liberation it promises.

The Royal Eastern has served the town for nearly two hundred years but it under threat of closure. In spite of this, the staff are still desperately juggling patients from unit to unit as the waiting lists grow and financial restraints continue. How does one choose who to take? The woman who desperately wants a baby or the other who longs to get rid of one? Jo Slater, dying with lung cancer but who has to go home because there are no beds in the ward, or Edward Saffron, the Junior Health Minister, who seems to have been given extra space in the same ward but might indeed save the hospital.

Abner was 17 when he learned that his parents were survivors from the Nazi death camps. Years later, now a prize-winning director, he sets out to expiate his own angry guilt by making a film about the Holocaust's corrosive aftermath. His search covers the length and breadth of Britain and Holland.

The early 1800's. Jesse Constam, a highly respected spice merchant, lives in fashionable Gower Street. Saved from poverty himself, he rescues two children from the gutter. Jesse's intervention changes their lives forever. The fate of Abel Lackland and Lilith Lucas and their families become inextricably entwined as they are destined for the vastly different worlds of medicine and the theatre.

It is 1911. At sixteen, Poppy is becoming a woman herself, and she can appreciate that the Suffragette Movement seems to promise a fairer future for all women. Then in 1914 The First World War breaks out and brings catastrophic loss and suffering. Poppy's life changes forever as the old certainties are swept away forever. However, she volunteers to work as an ambulance driver at the front in Flanders. There, amongst death and constant danger, she discovers a strange and unexpected liberation. She also meets a handsome war correspondent...