From the trauma of childhood upheavals to teenage pregnancy and an ill-fated marriage, Roses in Winter is the heart-wrenching story of Janet Calder. Told from the working-class tenements of Leith, Edinburgh and Glasgow in the early twentieth-century and a more prosperous Edinburgh of the 1950s and 1960s, it is a story of abandonment and abuse, domestic violence and toxic masculinity, and the silences kept within families.

In Janet Calder's story we find a woman whose resilience is a reminder that love and the ties that bind are even more powerful than the worst of what life can bring.