Mary-Anne O'Connor

1939. Australian-born Carl Smith loves his country, but he never meant to go to war. He is training to be a doctor and wants to protect lives, not take them. But if enlisting is the only way he can save his German-born father from an internment camp, he will.

Sydney, Christmas, 1901. Federation has been achieved but Australian women are yet to gain the right to vote in their new nation's elections and have a say in the laws that govern them.

Eighteen-year-old Junie Wallace is a smart girl and, with two brothers away at war and a third recently killed in action, she knows there is only one way to save the family farm for her grieving parents.

The 1960s are beating a fresh pulse of political and cultural upheaval through Sydney. For sheltered convent schoolgirl Poppy Flannery such changes seem irrelevant. But it doesn't stop her from longing to join in, especially if it means spending time with the popular boy she secretly loves...

At 17, Veronica O'Shay is happier running wild on the family farm than behaving in the ladylike manner her mother requires, and she despairs both of her secret passion for her brother's friend Jack Murphy and what promises to be a future of restraint and compliance.

At the most magical time of the year, will Mary choose independence or love? It's 1909 and Mary Richards has worked hard to gain an education and become a teacher in her close-knit, picturesque village in the Cotswolds, but not everyone approves of her modern ways. When her sister Emily becomes...