Anna is alone, and despite her fifteen years, she is still very much a child. Her elder sister Ruth, caught up in a world of parties, fashions and boyfriends, ignores her. And her brother Simon, to whom she is devoted, goes to London to study music. Listless and unhappy, Anna takes no pleasure in her family's new home, or in her surroundings. The Wyndcliffe, "a brooding ancient face of sheer stone, dour and grey," matches her mood. Then she encounters John Hollis, a young sympathetic poet. But he died in 1823......"

The summer Nicky Hennessy is seventeen, he is ready to take off, leave his family and their detested, smug way of life. But he cannot – not when he learns that his favourite aunt, Anna, is deathly ill. She is wasting away, and no one seems to be able to stop it. No one, that is, until Nicky meets John Hollis, the spirit of the Wyndcliffe, through his young cousin Deborah. And Nicky learns of another world – one where John represents a force strong enough to alter Nicky's whole life. Sing and Scatter Daisies is an extraordinary story of a young man who comes to terms with one rebellion, only to begin another.