'You'll have to sit with the orphans,' she said. 'On the bottom table.'
Lily pulled her coat tight. 'I'm not an orphan. I have a Mam.'
'But you haven't got a dad. Never did have one.'

Growing up in Macclesfield, a town whose cotton and silk industries were hit hard by the war, poor Lily Stanway never got to know her father. Neither can she understand the tensions and ties between her mother and the members of two Macclesfield families, the Hammonds and the Chancellors. But when she falls for a man she shouldn't and finds herself in trouble, many family secrets start to unravel...