"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,...

"It's the spring of 1938 and no longer safe to be a Jew in Vienna. Nineteen-year-old Elise Landau realizes her only means of escape is to advertise her services as a domestic servant in England. Fate brings her ad to the attention of Christopher Rivers, handsome scion of the aristocratic Rivers family and master of Tyneford. An anxious Elise arrives at Tyneford and immediately falls under its spell. When Christopher's young son, Kit, returns home,...

Nine-year-old Harriet Johnson goes ice-skating to strengthen her legs after an illness, befriends Lalla, the orphaned daughter of a great figure skating star, and finds encouragement to become a champion.

Alice Osbourne, the stolid daughter of the late vicar, is reeling from the news that Richard Fairfax broke their engagement to marry Evangeline Fontaine, an American girl from the Deep South. Evangeline's arrival causes a stir in the village but not the chaos that would ensue if they knew her motives for being there. Scrappy Elsie Pigeon is among the poor of London who see the evacuations as a chance to escape a life of destitution. Another new arrival...

Fourteen-year-old Johnny Trott, a bell-boy at London's Savoy Hotel in 1912, becomes caregiver to Kaspar Kandinsky, the Prince of Cats, and soon the two are stowing away on the Titanic, where they are befriended by the Stanton family of New York.

A young disabled girl and her brother are evacuated from London to the English countryside during World War II, where they find life to be much sweeter away from their abusive mother.