Nadine Crichton is a glamorous thirty-something woman of the eighties, running a successful business with her friend Pat. But is it enough? Orphaned as a young adult, she longs to have a family to belong to. She's not the sort to act on a whim, but as 1987 gets underway and heralds a whole series of disasters from the Zebrugge ferry sinking to the King's Cross fire, that's just what she does. Surely this look-alike woman from years ago must be a relative. Her search leads her first to a small English village, where she finds unexpected complications in the person of local farmer Josh...

In 1897 orphan Rose Turner revisits Exeter, the city of her birth. A chance meeting inspires her to find a way to better her life and escape the drudgery for which she's been trained. She also learns the truth of her family's death in a tragic fire ten years before. Back in London she enrols at a cookery school and becomes a key member of the team hired out to grand houses to cater for important guests, for she has a particular talent with ice-cream. At several of these she encounters George Kemble, self-made businessman, in line to succeed to the Duke of Fairleigh's title, should he meet the...

When Ellen Roberts opens her front door and finds her long-absent granddaughter Janie standing there, little does she expect she will be confronted by the past. For, once Janie unearths a box of correspondence from the First World War hidden in a cupboard, memories come flooding back-how Ellen solved the mystery of those letters, the romance she found along the way, and a guilty secret she's kept from her daughter Frances for years. That history belongs as much to Frances and Janie as to Ellen. Will she have the courage to share it?