It's 1945 and, as the troops begin to return home, the inhabitants of London try to put their lives back together. For 25-year-old Millie, a nurse and midwife, the jubilation at the end of the war is short-lived as she tends to the needs of the those around her.

Frank Rossi promised Matty the world. The Cockney Canary would become a world famous movie star. As his wife, she would be one half of a power couple, feted and adored by all. But the Wall Street crash puts paid to that and as Frank becomes more violent and unstable, Matty knows she must escape and so she flees at dead of night. Once home in Bermondsey, she goes into hiding and starts desperately looking for work. But only the hated biscuit factory...

From the grimy streets of Acton and Notting Hill to the bright lights of the West End, All My Mother's Secrets is a powerful, uplifting story from bestselling author Beezy Marsh. Annie Austin's childhood ends at the age of twelve, when she joins her mother in one of the slum laundries of Acton, working long hours for little pay. What spare time she has is spent looking after her younger brother George and her two stepsisters, under the glowering eye...

Eva, Peggy and Kathleen were sisters born into a close-knit working class family. As they grew up between the wars, they dreamed of escaping their violent father and the crime-ridden slums of Waterloo. Peggy was so appalled by conditions in the factories that she became a Communist. Beautiful Kathleen married an abusive man and later - during the Second World War - fell in love with a GI. Feisty Eva became a pickpocket as a child so she could help...

This title presents the memoirs of a girl born into a close-knit East End family in 1911.

Nancy and Terry have suffered terrible abuse at the hands of their father. Finding their way to St Saviour's Children's Home should mean safety. But little Terry is terribly damaged by his experiences, and the carers face challenges they could never have foreseen.

Hanna flees the scene of a terrible crime in her native Sligo. If she can just vanish, re-invent herself under a new name, perhaps the police won't catch up with her. London seems the perfect place to disappear. Lara has always loved Matthew and imagined happy married life in Dublin. Then comes the bombshell - Matthew says he wants to join the priesthood. Humiliated and broken-hearted, Lara heads to the most godless place she can find: the King's...

Connie Byrne, a nurse in London's East End working alongside Millie Sullivan from Call Nurse Millie , is planning her wedding to Charlie Ross, set to take place as soon as he returns from the war. But when she meets him off the train at London Bridge, she finds that his homecoming isn't going to go according to plan. Connie's busy professional life, and the larger-than-life patients in the district, offer a welcome distraction, but for how long?

Methods of parenting and education have progressed in recent years, especially compared to some of the more casually experimental routes inflicted on children of artistic professionals in the 70s and 80s. One experience that would take some beating is that endured by Baxter Dury. When punk rock star Ian Dury disappeared to make films in the late 80s, he left his teenage son in the care of his roadie, in a rundown flat in Hammersmith. But this was...

Best friends Becky, Bernie and Rose are working hard to establish themselves in 1930s Spitalfields. Becky, the daughter of a Jewish tailor, wants to become a nurse, but her father has more traditional plans for her. Aching to travel the world, Bernie feels trapped by her vast family of poor Irish dock workers. And then there is Rose. Tiny and thin, she lives with her drunken mother and a selection of surrogate fathers who brutalise them both. As Europe...