The year is 1911, and Otis Hewetson, 17 years old, is spending her summer holiday with her parents in Southsea. There she meets Jack and Esther Moth, the children of a police inspector, little suspecting that their future destinies are intertwined. By the author of Jude.

As World War Two breaks over Europe, Eve Anders is already a veteran from the Spanish Civil War. But now she's called to a very different kind of action: to come home to train for the newly-formed SOE. When Eve left her home town of Portsmouth, she'd never intended to return. Poor housing, poor wages and poor opportunities forced her to make a clean break. But the experience gained as a driver in Spain, desperately fighting for the Republic, enabled her to reinvent herself and to gain a confidence and maturity far beyond her years. She has become her own woman. Which makes her a very attractive prospect in more than one sense to David Hatton, who is charged with selecting highly unusual, independent and intelligent candidates for the Special Operations Executive. This mysterious woman from his past is obviously suitable - as is her current lover, a captain from the Soviet Secret Service. For in the war that lies ahead, one thing is certain: brute force won't be enough.

Lu grows up in the Portsmouth slums of the 1920s. She has to work in the infamous staymaking trade, where women endure conditions so appalling that Lu realizes things must change. She loves two very different men, finds deep friendship and develops a growing political awareness.

Nat is a self-made millionaire farmer - a plain, dour man, now forced to watch his laid-back son Jake take the reins of power. His village of Childencombe is cosily ordinary until a corn circle appears - the harbinger of change. Kuan-Yin, the "dragon-lady", appears and Nat's life changes.

Two women, two lives, two very different fates. Josephine is one of the very few female journalists in Victorian England – not a job for a respectable young woman. Her chosen path is far from easy but she's determined and courageous. Harriet is content to drift from one opportunity to another, from man to man, living by her singing, resorting to prostitution when times get tough. It's a turbulent, unpredictable life – a way of life which ultimately leads to her untimely end. Josephine is horrified and yet fascinated by the case. If circumstances had been different, Harriet's fate could have been her own. The two women are close in age, their families not so very different. What made one life turn out this way? Betty Burton has based this novel on a real-life tragedy and turns her storytelling talents to exploring the background. She writes of what it means to be a woman in a man's world – be it the ultimate victim with no control or the one who dares to try to break the mould.