London in the season: Grosvenor Square glitters with carriages and silk, and a flower girl named Jill watches the beautiful people ascend the steps of a mansion she'll never enter. She stands in the crowd with rough boys, pinched women, and her baby brother, selling posies to ladies who don't see her as human. This is the world Jill inhabits, a cramped flat with her mother Poll, who drinks to blunt the misery of their poverty, and two younger brothers dependent on Jill's earnings. But she refuses to let anyone see her mother's shame. She gathers her inebriated mother from the gutter with a fierce, protective love that borders on defiance, and she dreams of a different life: a quiet love with the steady Nat, a home that isn't haunted by hunger and shame. Meade paints the gap between the gleaming West End and the suffocating tenements with unflinching clarity, but her true subject is the quiet heroism of a girl who holds her family together with nothing but determination and hard-won dignity.
