Liverpool, 1940: Thirteen-year-old Joan's home is under constant threat from the Nazis' terrifying nightly air raids. Everyone is on edge, faced with strict food rationing, curfews, and blackouts. It's not an easy time to be a teenager. Joan's one solace is going to the movies with her best friend, the unflappable Doreen, but when the bombings intensify, even that becomes too dangerous. There's also the matter of a strange man who Joan sees lurking...

"Liverpool, 1935: Raised in a strict Catholic family, Viv Byrne knows what's expected of her: marry a Catholic man from her working-class neighborhood and have his children. However, when she finds herself pregnant after a fling with Joshua Levinson, a Jewish man with dreams of becoming a famous Jazz musician, Viv knows that a swift wedding is the only answer. Her only solace is that marrying Joshua will mean escaping her strict mother's scrutiny....

A novel on the 1854 Crimean War featuring a homosexual surgeon who volunteers to prove his manhood. He is George Hardy of Liverpool and he is accompanied by an assistant, a maid who bore the children which his barren wife claims. By the author of Every Man for Himself.

The death of a young girl leads Detective Sergeant Harry Barnard and Kate O'Donnell into a hotbed of simmering tensions, violence and threats in sixties' Soho. London, 1964. At three a.m. on a chilly autumn morning, Detective Sergeant Harry Barnard is called to a club in Greek Street where a young girl has fallen to her death from a top-floor window. A new breed of fans is flocking to Soho's rock and roll haunts. But was it a tragic accident, or something...