Carol Rivers

Lizzie Flowers has had a hard life, but she is still full of true East End grit. In the bleak years after World War I, her family faced desperate times, and deep tensions split them apart....

It’s Christmas 1880 in London’s East End, and a dying Irish girl leaves her baby in the care of the Sisters of Clemency. The nuns raise little Ettie O’Reilly as their own. But the lives of the nuns and orphans are soon crushed by an unexpected turn of events....

Britain has just declared war on Germany, and the whole country seems to be in uproar. Flora, Hilda and Will, who grew up together in St Boniface orphanage sit in the sunshine....

East London, 1938. Nine-year-old Daisy Purbright is a country girl at heart, and together with beloved brother Bobby, they've enjoyed the endless freedoms of rural England....

1934: Lizzie Flowers has been mother and protector to her East End family, the Allens of Langley Street, since she was 15. Even when her doomed marriage to Frank Flowers collapses, she sacrifices her own happiness to keep the family united....