Evie is born in Carlisle in 1887, and her earliest memories are only of being brought up by the woman called her grandmother. Evie and Shona, born almost seventy years apart, are women of very different personalities. And Hazel – unmarried and pregnant in the 1950s, her mother arranges for her to have her child in Norway, where it is adopted out and Hazel never wants to hear or think about it (and she considers the child an ‘it’) again.But as their stories unfold, it becomes apparent that they share much more than their yearning to find the mothers they never knew.