Benita Brown

After the fall of France, Hazel, Irene and Carol are sent from the east end of Newcastle to the safety of a country village. Billeted in a grand house with a spinster and her niece, the three young evacuees' futures will be irrevocably changed by their new lives. When peace is declared, and Hazel and Irene return to the families they were forced to leave, they find Newcastle very different to the home they remembered. Mourning the people they loved, they try to leave the past behind and start again. But it's never easy to forget ...

Melissa Dornay is the daughter of a humble dressmaker. When her mother dies, Melissa is offered a home by wealthy Lilian Winterton, but she soon realises Lilian wants an unpaid seamstress. Treated as a servant by the Wintertons, Melissa is befriended by Reenie, a kitchen maid, and they enjoy dressing up in Lilian's cast-off clothes. Wearing finery, Melissa meets handsome young artist James Pennington, but she runs away, frightened he will guess her true status. Scandal follows and Melissa is unfairly thrown out on to the streets. Can the rags of her life be sewn into riches!?

Brooke Lawson lost a successful past in the accident that almost look her life, but the healing winds of Hawaii brought her peace. In the tropical splendor of an island night she learned from Ashley Graham the only truth that mattered: There is no past so hard that desire's light cannot show the way to a new and fuller day.

When Kay Lockwood is left a small inheritance by her mother's old friend, actress Lana Fontaine, she travels to London, leaving behind her Northern hometown and the boyfriend she doesn't quite trust. She falls in love with Lana's ramshackle house, and the excitement of post-war London, but soon discovers a deeper mystery - who was Lana, and why was Kay so important to her? As she unravels the past, her handsome new neighbour Tom seems to offer her a bright future, but when his own dark secret is revealed, Kay feels hurt and betrayed. Can she ever forgive him?

When Juliet Porter's mother dies, she leaves Juliet some old letters and a photograph which shatter all her previously-held beliefs. They show that her real father was an American bomber pilot in the second world war, some forty years before, and that he had met her mother while serving in England. Armed only with this photo, Juliet sets out to trace her real father, and eventually finds the airfield where he served. In 1943, Juliet's mother Daisy is in the WAAF and stationed at the airfield which is taken over by the American airmen at a moment's notice. She falls in love with a bomber pilot who is then posted missing, presumed dead; pregnant and grieving, she marries a long-term admirer.

Rae Perry is young, unmarried, and far from home as she awaits the birth of her first child -- accompanied by the angry, moody man she's loved since high school. Lila Grey is a fortune-teller with no interest in the future, a mother who lost her daughter long ago, on a cold, cold day. Now, as these two women meet, it is earthquake weather in California -- when animals panic, friends and lovers quarrel, ice cubes dissolve in the palm of your hand. It is a time when things are in the air, and the unexpected happens. For Rae and Lila, it will mean the sudden intertwining of their lives and fates -- as each makes a bid to change her fortune forever...