The East End nurse
(Large Print - Adult)

Standard print edition originally published: as The Poplar penny whistlers. London: Robert Hale, 2011.

Includes bibliographical references.

At the sonorous boom of the foghorn, young Hester Stainsby gives an involuntary shudder. In the cavernous basement laundry room of the Poplar Hospital where she toils from dawn to dusk, there is fog too, damp, hot and swirling. Her fears are realised: her father has been badly injured in an accident in the East India Docks.,London's East End, 1890 Growing up in poverty, Hester Stainsby toils day and night in the laundry room of Poplar Hospital to help support her family; her father Fred, her younger twin siblings, Harry and Polly, and cantankerous Granny Garter. When Fred is badly injured in an accident at the docks, the family's fortunes take a turn for the worse. Determined to make a better life for herself and her loved ones, Hester trains to be a nurse, throwing herself into hospital life. Nursing in London's busy East End is never easy and Hester must be willing to make sacrifices. But when a heroic and mysterious patient lands in her care, she feels something she never has before. Will love jeopardise everything she's worked so hard for? And can she find the happiness she and her family are so desperately searching for? "Like having dinner with your mother in her warm and cosy kitchen." DIANE ALLEN, bestselling author of For the Sake of Her Family