Dorothy Whipple

This is the story of a Northern middle-class family in the years before and after the First World War. Louisa Ashton is the matriarch of the family, with daughters Letty and Laura, sons Jim and Charles. Her children are now grown up and beginning to make their way in the world. War intervenes, and everything changes. We will follow the Ashton family closely with all its ups and downs as the pressures mount, and with them will come moments of sublime happiness, but also pain and tragedy, and many hard decisions to be made.

Set around the Great War, Jane Carter, a seventeen-year-old orphan, finds herself applying for a new position in a draper’s shop, the best in the Lancashire mill town of Tidsley. She soon rises from being a draper's assistant to having her own dress shop. But Jane pays for her success. She works hard, she is frustrated by the prejudices of the class system, and she has to deal with some difficult relationships.

Avery North has been contentedly married to Ellen for 20 years, they have two children and live in the rural commuter belt outside London. Then his mother advertises for a companion, and the French girl who arrives sets her sights on Avery, callously threatening the happy marriage.

The Blakes are an ordinary family: Celia looks after the house and Thomas works at the family engineering business in Leicester. The book begins when he meets Mr Knight, a financier as crooked as any on the front pages of our newspapers nowadays; and tracks his and his family's swift climb and fall.

Three sisters marry very different men and the choices they make determine whether they will flourish, be tamed or be repressed. Lucy's husband is her beloved companion; Vera's husband bores her and she turns elsewhere; and Charlotte marries Geoffrey, a boorish, hard-drinking salesman who evolves into a domestic dicator, and turns a high-spirited naive young girl into a deeply unhappy woman.