It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen, the out-of-work and hungry are demanding change. In a genteel Camberwell villa -- a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and servants -- impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances's life -- or how far-reaching the disturbances will be.

In 1934 Kit finds that she has hard lessons to learn about the Depression both at home, where she is helping her mother run a boarding house while her father looks for a new job, and at school, where a fight spoils the preparations for the Thanksgiving pageant.

In a time of drought and economic depression in 1934, Ella Barron runs her boardinghouse in Texas while caring for her son, Solly, and responds to the calm influence of one of her boarders, David Rainwater, while facing the tension and uncertainty around her.

Jillian Slater hadn't seen her father or his mother in almost 20 years until, on the news that her father had finally drunk himself to death, Adella Atwater, the manager of her grandmother's apartment house, calls and says Jillian's expenses would be paid if she'd fly in to New Orleans for the burial. What Adella didn't tell her was that the apartment house bears the dead weight of a long and painful history. As an investigation into her father's...