Di Langford

Jessie Price travels from South Wales on the drovers' road to London's Smithfield Market. Her ambition is to raise herself up from her lowly position as a milkmaid and to run her own dairy. For a while she succeeds - but before long this ambition leads to poverty and shame as the man she loves is taken to Newgate Prison to face the death penalty for a crime he did not commit.

Dora Simon and Joe O’Cleary live in separate countries, accepting of their twilight years. But their monochrome worlds are abruptly upended by the arrival of Barbara Hummel, who is determined to identify the mysterious woman whose photograph she has found among her mother’s possessions. Forced to confront the past, Dora and Joe’s lives unravel – and entwine.

After an idyllic childhood, Manon Jenkins is left alone and homeless when her father dies. She spurns the attentions of Morgan Lewis, and instead becomes a chaperone to the sister of her beloved Caradoc Jones, a drover. When she becomes pregnant she finds that it is difficult to escape the clutches of the Jones family…