This family saga engages our minds and our emotions from its opening in the First World War to its close in the post Second War years. We move with Rose, an ordinary woman,through these extraordinary years of challenge. We enter into the joys of early married life, wartime separation and the temptation that a new relationship brings. But behind it all we feel the ever-present, growing tension of a controlling, violent relationship. On the bigger canvas we glimpse some of the horrors of war, the hidden, secret work of the code-breakers and the disruption that evacuation brought. War and peace, town and village, love and hatred,hope and despair combine to touch the heart of the reader in what is a very human tale.