Kirjahaku

Everybody dreams of a surprise inheritance and one comes to Meg at her lowest ebb, a letter, from an uncle she has never heard of, leaving her a derelict mill and bakery in a Yorkshire dale. With the gift comes a strange final request, asking her to 'help close the circle'. Meg visits the mill, falls in love with the place and its surroundings and throws herself into the challenge of rebuilding the old business. In the process she finds new friends - and a new love. But at the back of her mind are the questions of who exactly was the dead Henry Masterton - and why did he leave Meg everything he owned?

Becky and Kathy are great friends and, in a cruel yet comforting parallel, both have recently lost their jobs and face the prospect of starting their lives all over again. Becky takes a relative up on his offer of the use of his narrowboat, and sets sail for the Yorkshire Dales, to see if pastures new can help her regain what she's lost. Kathy finds herself in love with a widower, whose only daughter is still in mourning for her gifted musician mother, her grief proving a solid opponent to any new woman in her father's life. Both women must endure the weaving and uncertain path of life, and love, towards a second chance at happiness.

This novel traces the story of the final Scottish Women's Hospital Volunteers Unit, which was set up on the Eastern Front in Russia in 1916. Sent to help the Serbian army, it was largely taken over by the retreating Russian army, and suffered being left to its own devices during three major defeats and retreats. In the process, it coped with unbelievable levels of war casualties, mostly on its own. The novel tells how the Unit survived the war, and the Russian collapse when that country was torn apart by its revolutions, through the eyes of a young doctor surgeon, Anna Hardisty, who as deputy leader found herself in charge of an impossible task - not just to help the war wounded, but to bring the Unit safely home