"London, 1938. Bookseller Gertie Bingham is facing difficult times, having just lost her beloved husband, Harry, and with a lingering sadness at never having been able to have a child of her own. Struggling to face running the bookshop she and Harry opened together, Gertie is preparing to sell up and move away when she is asked if she would be willing to take in a young Jewish refugee from Germany. Gertie is unsure and when sullen teenager Hedy Fischer...

"London, 1945: Four adolescent orphans with a dark wartime history are squatting in a vacant Belgravia mansion--the owners having fled London under heavy Luftwaffe bombing. Soon after a demobilized British soldier, ill and reeling from his experiences overseas, takes shelter with the group, Maisie Dobbs visits the mansion on behalf of the owners. Maisie is deeply puzzled by the children's reticence. Their stories are evasive and, more mysteriously,...

In World War II England, orphaned siblings William, Edmund, and Anna are evacuated from London to live in the countryside, where they bounce from home to home in search of someone willing to adopt them permanently.

In 1940 England, stuck in a train tunnel while German fighter jets fly overhead, Barney hears an unlikely story of a highly decorated World War I soldier who once had a chance to kill young Adolf Hitler.

Moving into her sister's country house in 1938 England after years abroad, Phyllis becomes entangled in a circle of idealistic new friends and their views about a charismatic new leader before a lapse in judgment changes the course of her life.

The lives of two sets of best friends, Kate and Ruby in England and Erik and Hans in Germany, as well as a stray dog in London are brought together in unexpected ways during World War II.

In 1930s Liverpool, England, Bronwen and Dylan live with their widowed mother, who works long hours doing other people's washing, and even though she sometimes must leave the children alone in the house, she cautions them not to speak to the O'Rileys next door, who go to a different church.

Bullied at school and by his father, thirteen-year-old Jack, a messenger boy during the London Blitz, becomes a hero after meeting a stray dog that can smell people buried beneath rubble.

"In 1940, with his father off to war, Joseph is sent on a train out of his British town into the care of Mrs. F., a gruff woman with no great fondness for children. But he soon discovers her softer side when she takes him to the rundown city zoo and he learns she is the only one who ever checks in on it. Many of the animals have escaped, been released, or have sadly starved . . . but not Adonis, a huge silverback gorilla. Adonis is strong and ferocious--and...