Cassandra Blake has raised her three motherless sisters. The girls are the pride of their book-loving, impractical father Zachariah, and not in a hurry to marry. Then the American Civil War cuts off supplies of cotton to Lancashire, the mills fall silent and there is no work. There is a stark choice, stay and risk starvation or pack up and begin again elsewhere. From Anna Jacobs who is the tenth most borrowed fiction author in libraries - saga storytelling at its finest.