In early nineteenth-century England, a spirited young woman copes with the suit of a snobbish gentleman as well as the romantic entanglements of her four sisters.

Rushing to assist the family of her murdered best friend, Ellie consoles reclusive widower Greg and nurtures eight-year-old Lucy, who has stopped speaking.

In the brief golden years of the Edwardian era the McCosh sisters--Christabel, Ottilie, Rosie and Sophie--grow up in an idyllic household in the countryside south of London. On one side, their neighbors are the proper Pendennis family, recently arrived from Baltimore, whose close-in-age boys--Sidney, Albert and Ashbridge--shake their father's hand at breakfast and address him as "sir." On the other side is the Pitt family: a "resolutely French" mother,...

Torn from her mother to escape the impending Blitz during the summer of 1939, eight-year-old Anna Sands is relocated with other children to a large Yorkshire estate where she is drawn into the unraveling relationship of an enigmatic couple.