Susan Brief is blond, attractive and just thirty-four. Her relatively short life is full of tangled relations: Her son, Fred, at thirteen is on the edge of, er, everything; her ex, the boozy diehard Derek, is on the loose and after her. Then there's her zany neighbours and her little 'surprise' daughter, Rosie. Enter Rachel, Susan's adoptive sister. She's bright, beautiful well-built and... black. Heads turn in the little Durham pit village of Upper Kissing. Old attitudes, old politics and old clothes are thrown aside. And in the maelstrom of emotions that follows, the Briefs - Mackams to the...