Angela McCluskey comes to Birmingham from Ireland with her family as a young girl to escape poverty at the turn of the 20th Century, but bad fortune dogs the family as the years pass. Angela marries her childhood sweetheart but tragedy is heaped upon misery when he is called up in the Great War and dies at the Somme. She gives birth to a young daughter called Constance who she must rear on her own, but the worst is yet to come when Angela is raped...

In the beginning? Kitty Cartwright has always solved her problems in the kitchen. Her cookbooks are her life, and there isn?t an issue that ?Cooking with Aspic? can?t fix. Her only wish is that she had a book entitled ?Rustling Up Dinner When Your Husband Has Left You?. Forty years later? On Rosemary Lane, Della Cartwright plans to open a very special little bookshop. Not knowing what to do with the hundreds of cookbooks her mother left her, she now...