The Facts of Life tells the story of an extraordinary family of seven sisters living in Coventry during the second world war. Presided over by an indomitable matriach the sisters live out a tangled and fraught life that takes them through the blitz, war work and on into the hopeful postwar years and a bizarre interlude for one of them in a commune. And through it all wanders the young son of one of the sisters, passed from sister to sister, the innocent witness to a life that edges over into the magical and the world of the fey.