The War over, Rex and Hazel and Peter and Margaret go to East Anglia, with its windmills and corn, to make their lives. Rex is a poet, Peter a farmer, and they and their wives bring clashing political allegiances to the sleepy village of Farthingale. At the beginning of the new decade Rex founds his poetry magazine Review 50, and Peter starts what is intended to be a pacifist farm.

When Rex leaves Hazel in 1960, Peter and Margaret find her an abandoned old farmhouse and she and her children move in. This is about their plans, their ideals, about the compromises they make with reality, and what happens as they live through the 1960s and 70s, as their children grow and become critical of their parents. It’s about the conflict between men and women, mothers and daughters, and about the nature of Freedom, the constant struggle for it, and how that struggle affects human relationships. Mostly it’s about a love affair that began in the Second World War, and survived marriage, children, divorce and death.

Carol Lake

Carol Lake won the Guardian Fiction Award for her first book Rosehill – Portraits from a Midlands City, and much acclaim for her second book Switchboard Operators, which subsequently became a television series by the same name. Both books were highly praised by critics and went on to become successful publications in hardback and paperback.

The author left school at 15, but went on to gain A-levels in English Literature and History. She has worked as a switchboard operator, run a secondhand bookshop and has been an assistant editor of a weekly news-sheet, as well as a typist, receptionist and nurse. More recently she has run a poetry class for juniors in the inner city of Derby.

Apart from her novels she also writes occasional columns for various newspapers and magazines.