Taking Heart — Rowena Summers

Bristol, 1939: When lovely nineteen-year-old Imogen Caldwell learns from her father that their haberdashery shop, Caldwell Supplies, is in crisis, she realises that her life and that of her family is about to change beyond recognition. Her beautiful mother, Frances, is ailing and responsibility for the household will fall on Imogen's shoulders. Baz, their younger brother, had no interest in the family business anyway and is set on becoming a ferryman, much to their father's disappointment. To prevent their house from being sold, Imogen gives up her dream of becoming a journalist and suggests that they take in respectable paying lodgers - and her younger sisters Elsie and the precocious Daisy reluctantly agree to help out at home. Morgan Raine, Imogen's sweetheart, isn't happy with the amount of time Imogen devotes to her new way of life, and it isn't long before he is unfaithful to her. She is devastated, but is slowly and gently courted by Robert Preston, the man who was unwittingly responsible for the collapse of her father's business. Imogen knows her father would see their romance as the ultimate betrayal and she is reluctant to upset him. But it is when their mother dies shortly after the outbreak of war, leaving their father inconsolable, that the real changes in Imogen's life begin.