"She was too restless to work or write. She thought of Richard, of her unmanageable desires and her unabateable ambitions...My life is in pieces, I am nothing, I have achieved nothing; yet I will, she thought." In the month of the 1918 Armistice a young woman, Hervey Russell, comes to London to seek her fortune. Inexperienced an poor, she has all the dreams of youth. Hervey is alone, her husband in the Air Force still, her baby son in Yorkshire. She plunges into the social and political ferment of London life with her friends T.S. and Philip, her slovenly neighbour Delia, and her lover, the American Jess Gage. This is the beginning of Hervey' story...

Six years after the Great War, a promising writer—Hervey Russell—is frustrated by her career and her marriage to an unloving man. Her desperate longing for a new beginning finds an outlet when she encounters her war-damaged cousin Nicholas, who until this meeting has thought his life was over. Love in Winter forms the second part of the Mirror in Darkness trilogy, and its heroine is the author's autobiographical shadow.

It is 6th May, 1926, the third day of the General Strike. This is the story of that harrowing week seen through the eyes of the women and men of London as they move through that unreal city. We meet those who gave their all for the strike - and a vision of a better world. We meet, too, those who fought to break it with every weapon they had: power, politics, money - or brute force. There are masters and workmen, fascists and communists, politicians and trade unionists, wives and mistresses, artists, writers and scientists, all cught up in the web of each other's lives. But above all we follow the thread of Hervey Russell's life as she is swept up by the political ferment around her, by the difficulties of a new marriage, and by her hopes and fears for the future...