Set in wartime England this novel relates the story of Vera,a nurse who has a baby and a friend Ramsden, and parents who don't understand her. She and the baby, and sometimes Ramsden, eke out their days at shabby hospitals across England, dreaming always of better places, other things.

An intoxicating cocktail of adrenaline and the kind of vulnerability we would all admit to if we were honest, Once You Break a Knuckle explores the courage it takes just to make it through the day. Set in the remote Kootenay Valley in western Canada, these are stories of good people doing bad two bullied adolescents sabotage a rope swing, resulting in another boy’s death; a heartbroken young man refuses to warn his best friend about an approaching car; sons challenge fathers and break taboos. Crackling with tension and propelled by jagged, cutting dialogue, the stories interconnect and reveal to us how our best intentions are doomed to fail or injure, how our loves can fall short or mislead us, how even friendship—especially friendship—can be something dangerously temporary. Wilson portrays a world barbed with violence and the possibility of betrayal. And yet, in this small, finely wrought universe, it is with doggedness and dignity that we carry on.

'It isn't a repetition,' Mr George says when I meet him at the station, 'It isn't a repetition, is it, of that fellow Metcalf? This isn't the same sort of thing is it?' Mr George has come all the way from Scotland to the Midlands to ask me this question...I tell him of course it is different. I am older now...I am a doctor now and in my first resident appointment. I remind him that I am the mother of two daughters and that, above all, I belong to him, Mr George. Vera and Mr George have made a new life together but Vera's thoughts return again and again to loves and lovers, meetings and partings, the voices that echo in the mind like music. What has she learned from the well-bred peace of the Georges' household; the decadence and disorder of her friendship with Noel and Felicity; the fun and vulgarity shared with her 'widow' on the long voyage to Australia? Must she always repeat the past? As in My Father's Moon and Cabin Fever Elizabeth Jolley returns to the themes of discord and harmony between brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, friends and lovers. Her spare and sensitive prose is illuminated with compassion and understanding for the intricacies of human relationships.