Eddie and Eva meet on the eve of the Second World War. Eddie only wants to be a flyer, to find escape in the clouds from his own complicated family. However, the Battle of Britain makes a pilot's life a dangerous way to flee reality. Eva has her own passionate longing: to become a painter. When Eva's Jewish mother disappears to Germany, she is left alone with her elderly father. Both Eddie and Eva come of age at a time that teaches them that happiness is always fleeting, but there are things worth living -- or dying -- for.
Britain is at war and Ruth, a gifted pilot, is determined to join the Air Transport Auxiliary. Over in America, Jack and Lucy Nelson, are also keen to join. After a perilous journey by sea, Jack is posted to White Waltham, where he quite literally bumps into Ruth. She soon realises that she has fallen in love with Jack - but with death and heartbreak all around them, the cautious Jack can't put his heart on the line. As the tide of war changes, Jack is sent to France to deliver a Spitfire, but his plane never arrives. Devastated, Ruth must accept that the love of her life may never return.
When her home is destroyed in a bombing raid over London, Miranda Beddoes is forced to take refuge with her grandparents in Dorset. With both her parents doing their duty for king and country, she joins the WAAF. Despite her dedication to work, Miranda falls for a charismatic fighter pilot. As the battle rages in the skies above them and she learns that his plane has been hit, it is only the friendship of her fellow girls in blue that keeps her going as she waits for news.
As the drums of war begin to beat louder on the continent, 17-year-old Jeannie McIver heads to the wilds of the Scottish Uplands to start life as a Land Girl. Jeannie soon falls in love with life on the busy Scottish hill farm. She even finds her interest piqued by the attractive Tam, the son of the neighbouring farmer. But even in the barren hills, they can't avoid the hell of war, and Jeannie's idyllic life starts to crumble.
1931. Fifteen-year-old Kate witnesses her mother Millicent push a stranger from a station platform into the path of an oncoming train. There was no warning, seemingly no reason, and absolutely no remorse. 1940. Exactly nine years later, Kate returns to the station and notices a tramp laying flowers on the exact spot that the murder was committed; the identity of the victim still remains unknown. With a country torn apart by war and her family estate and name in tatters, Kate has nothing to lose as she attempts to uncover family secrets that date back to the Great War and solve a mystery that blights her family name.
London, 1942. Charlotte Fenimore is back home on a week's leave from the Women's Auxiliary Airforce. She had planned for a week of rest and recuperation. She hadn't planned to fall deeply in love with an irascible detective called Dan Chalmers, a wounded hero of Dunkirk who believed no woman would ever look at him again. DI Chalmers is in London to arrest a gang of dangerous East End criminals and root out corrupt police detectives at the Met -- and his involvement with Charlotte brings her into serious danger. And then the plane flying Charlotte to the wilds of Scotland comes down in a storm... In a time of war, with danger around every corner, how can their relationship survive?
Faced with both the Second World War and also some dangerous and unhappy relatives, can the Owen sisters keep hold of their shop and celebrate the end of the war with hope in their hearts?
Thrown together by tragic circumstances some years previously, Meg and Clarrie's hard-won friendship eventually brought them both some sense of peace. But how deep do their feelings run, and how long can their happiness last? The outbreak of war brings a new set of concerns and emotions, especially with the arrival of the evacuees who come to share their home and lives. Can they unite to form a bond powerful enough to sustain them through the darkest days of war?
June 1944. Eighteen-year-old Ginnie Travis works in her father's furniture shop in the suburbs of East London when the continued bombing raids and her sister Shirley's untimely pregnancy force the two girls to go and stay with their aunt in Shropshire. Here Ginnie falls in love with an American, Lieutenant Nick Miller, stationed nearby.
1940. London is facing the full wrath of the blitz and amid the chaos Sheila Phipps is orphaned after a devastating air raid claims her family and her home. She is evacuated to Bletchley to live with her aunt Constance, where she forms an unlikely friendship with Prudence Le Strange, who is working in the code breaking unit at Bletchley.
When war broke out, 17-year-old Christie could have stayed down on the family farm in Norfolk, where she was wanted and needed. So why had she joined up? Come to that, why had Meg from Cheshire, and Sue, very much the big city girl from Liverpool, and Shanna, the life-toughened product of a broken home in Glasgow? Mixed reasons. Very mixed backgrounds. But no time to think now. Not with the sergeant shouting and the station air-raid siren beginning to wail.
Independent-minded journalist Seffy Blake falls instantly in love with the mysterious Amyas Troy when they meet on an idyllic beach in Cornwall in 1937. But Amyas runs off to fight in Spain before he can fulfil his promise to marry her. Heartbroken Seffy returns to work at a national newspaper, working as assistant to Charlie Bradford, a renowned foreign correspondent. As her work takes her to Berlin and war-torn Spain, her path crosses with Amyas again, and her love remains undimmed. But a night on a bleak mountain in Spain changes her life forever, and Seffy needs to decide what is important.
February 1941. Julie Harris is working in London's East End as a midwife when a bombing raid destroys her family and the house she grew up in. All she has left is her motherless baby nephew William.
