Set in the industrial Black Country between the years 1907 and 1915, this book follows a young woman, Clover Beckitt, and her mother who, after fifteen years of widowhood, suddenly announces she is about to get married again. Her mother's new husband, Jacob Tandy, brings to the family his pretty seventeen year-old daughter Ramona, and his younger brother Elijah, and that is when Clover's real troubles begin.