The Dreaming Suburb — R.F. Delderfield

Between the wars, the lives of four neighboring English families intersect in this “highly recommended” saga by a New York Times�"bestselling author (Sunday Express).

In the spring of 1919, his wife's death brings Sergeant Jim Carver home from the front. He returns to be a single parent to his seven children in a place he has never lived: Number Twenty, Manor Park Avenue, in a South London suburb.
 
The Carvers' neighbor Eunice Fraser, at Number Twenty-Two, has also known tragedy. Her soldier husband was killed, leaving her and her eight-year-old son, Esme, to fend for themselves.
 
At Number Four, Edith Clegg takes in lodgers and looks after her sister, Becky, whose mind has been shattered by a past trauma.
 
No one knows much about the Friths, at Number Seventeen, who moved to the Avenue before the war.
 
The first book in the two-part historical series the Avenue, which also includes The Avenue Goes to War, The Dreaming Suburb takes readers into the everyday lives of these English families between World War I and World War II, as their hopes, dreams, and struggles are played out against a radically changing world.