June 1941, the Isle of Dogs. A few weeks after the end of the Blitz, 19-year-old Pearl Jenkins is celebrating her marriage to engineer Jim Nesbitt. But the joyful event is marred by a fight between Pearl's new husband and her sister's boyfriend, Ricky Winters - Pearl's former admirer. For the first time, Pearl realizes that there's a possessive side to Jim she hadn't been aware of before. Shortly after the wedding, Jim enlists - leaving Pearl alone to cope with the East End bombs and her difficult mother-in-law. During a brief visit to her parents, now living in Oxfordshire, Pearl attends a dance for foreign servicemen - after which she is cruelly raped, resulting in an unplanned pregnancy. When Jim returns, scarred and wounded, in 1944, he refuses to believe that the pregancy is not the result of an affair - and physically attacks Pearl. Can she ever forgive him? Can the marriage survive? Or is Pearl strong enough to forge an independent life of her own in an austere post-war world?

Genre: Sagas