Lancashire, 1931. When Finn Carlisle loses his wife and unborn child, he spends a few years travelling to keep the sad memories at bay. Just as he's ready to settle down again, his great-uncle dies and leaves everything to him. This includes Heythorpe House in Ellindale, just down the road from Leah Willcox and her little fizzy drink factory. Finn...

Hannah and Humphrey Drayton were regarded by all who knew them as the perfect married couple. However, all was not as it appeared on the surface, and after years of tyranny and loneliness, Hannah could no longer bear this stuffy City broker. The only relief she had was from his absence on Thursday evenings, when pleayed bridge with a group of acqua...

Lancashire, 1934. When Tam Crawford is unexpectedly bequeathed some money, he can finally realise his dream of settling down in the beautiful village of Ellindale. Tam knows he can be impulsive - his nickname isn't Crazy Tam for nothing! - but this time he is determined not to be ruled by his big heart and hot head. Yet somehow, within just one day...

Leah Turner's father has been killed in an accident at the laundry, and since her mother died years ago it falls to her to become sole provider for her little sister. But women's wages are half those of men and pawning the few belongings she has left will only keep their vicious rent collector at bay for a few weeks, so even if she finds a job, the...

Born in Colombo, Judith Dunbar spends her teenage years at boarding school while her beloved mother and younger sister live abroad with her father. When her new friend, Loveday Carey-Lewis, invites Judith home for the weekend to Nancherrow, the Carey-Lewises' beautiful estate on the Cornish coast, it is love at first sight. She falls in love, too,...

Widower Harry Makepeace lives in Manchester with his sickly daughter, Cathie, scrimping and saving to get by. But after she suffers a violent asthma attack, the doctors say she must move to the clean, fresh air of the countryside to have any hope of survival. When Harry chances upon a patch of land for sale in Ellindale and an advert for a disused...

Gracie Burton is a grandmother living quietly in Devon. She has rarely left the village over the past 40 years. Her daughter, Carina, is immensely high-powered, with her own fast-paced business in London. She has very little time for her 17-year-old daughter, Anastasia, away at boarding school, and even less time for her ageing mother. In many ways...

Emma Reece is slowly adjusting to her husband's return from the war, even though his appalling injuries mean their marriage is in name only. But then tragedy strikes, and Emma finds she cannot turn to Jack Harvey, her long-standing friend and one-time lover-for while he still loves her, he is now a married man...The final instalment in Rosie Clarke...

Bill Bailey, the rugged Liverpudlian, was now a fully-fledged Tyneside building contractor, as staunchly loyal to his squad of workmen as they were to him. He had also met and married Fiona, a young widow with her own loveable family, to which she and Bill shortly added with the adoption of the orphaned Mamie. Life was good, but the economic climat...

In this, the third novel of a trilogy, the atmosphere in the Bailey household was alive with anticipation. It was not only beucase Christmas was approraching, or even that Bill Bailey was tackling the biggest project of his career. No, all the excitement was because in two weeks' time, Fiona bailey would give birth to a baby, the first arrival sinc...