Böcker av Patrick Gildea

Tragedy strikes a young married couple living in Bradford West Yorkshire in the late 1940s. Timmothy Dove's wife dies after prematurely giving birth to a set of triplets, two sons and a daughter. Timmothy struggles to bring up his new family on his own, he finally realises that he can no longer give them the love, attention and sustenance that they require, therefore he has no option but to put his three children into the care of the local authority. Two of the children are soon adopted, the other one Sidney unbeknown to him was named after his late grandfather just seems to be the odd one out, he is in and out of different fostering family homes and regularly returns back into the care of the local authority because of his disruptive behaviour. None of the children were to be informed of the tragic circumstances in which both their parents died, and it was agreed by the authority's that the children's new parents would also be given no background details of their past life.

Andrew Munroe gets declared bankrupt after his building business in Leeds West Yorkshire suddenly collapses. Andy is diagnosed as suffering from clinical depression. He abandons his wife and daughter hoping to kick-start his life finding work down in London. He feels that he has let his family down badly and assures himself that they would be far better off without him. After hitching a lift that takes him down to the South East Coast, Andy meets up with a kind and caring pair of star-struck elderly lovers, one of whom owns a boarding house in Basildon. Two other main characters in the book enter the story intermittently. The first is a girl named Gita from Birmingham, who is running away from an arranged marriage. As her story unfolds she too will eventually end up living down on the South East Coast.The other is Sam, a loveable rogue born and bred in the East End of London. After serving an eight-year prison sentence in one of Her Majesty's Correctional Facilities for manslaughter, he too shuns his place of birth and makes his way towards the South East Coast. All three will eventually meet up but not in the circumstances that you may expect or predict.