Rachel Billington

In the twists and turns of the Gallipoli campaign, there were three lives torn apart by the strangest campaign of WWI. Three people finding a way through this war of devastating proportions; and three people testing the strength of relationships forged in wartime.

At 18 Mary had a love affair. There was a baby and she had it adopted. Now on holiday with her husband, David, the phone rings: it is her first daughter, reared in America, and she wants to meet her natural mother. The result of her visit is to affect the whole family and cause a good deal of re-thinking of long-accepted facts.

K returns to Britain to attend the wedding of Claudia who he loved obsessively fourteen years ago, when she was a schoolgirl. Now Claudia faces a very different future and a past that cannot be easily banished.

Alice Lightfoot was too young to be a wife, and is now to young to be a widow and a grandmother. Now, two years after her husband's death, she is at a turning point and has to make far-reaching choices and face the seriously unexpected.

Ned had been given the choice to stay at school like other sad boys with nowhere to go for the holiday or go to his older cousin who treated him like a slave. Or he could spend two weeks in a seaside cottage with his aunt who had a cat, but no television, and cooked him huge meals three times a day. What will happen when he chooses to live with his aunt?

Three women, all born in 1940, meet in the early 1960's. Improbably, Connie, Nina and Fay become friends and this relationship sustains them through the dramas and tragedies of their lives for over forty years.