Linda Grant

Stephen Newman arrived in England from California in 1968. Sent down from Oxford, he hurriedly marries his English girlfriend Andrea to avoid returning to America and the draft board. Over the next 40 years the couple enjoy a life of middle-class success, but the events of the new century force them to question their lives.

In 1946, Evelyn Sert, a 20 year old hairdresser from Soho sets sail for Palestine. Once in Tel Aviv, where many people are starting a new life, Evelyn re-invents herself and with her lover, Johnny, finds herself at the heart of a dangerous game.

World War II is over, a new decade is beginning, but for an East End teenage brother and sister, life has been suspended. Sent away to a tuberculosis sanatorium to learn the way of a patient, they discover that a cure is tantalisingly just out of reach, and only by inciting wholesale rebellion can freedom be snatched.