内容简介：
Kitty Clark was born in a small Lancashire mining town in 1925. Her childhood was dominated by poverty, a strict Catholic upbringing, and a cruel, abusive and alcoholic father. After being brutally raped at the age of sixteen, she entered into a war-time marriage that produced a succession of children and a life of drudgery and hardship. Facing the prejudices of a small, predominantly Catholic mining town, we follow the trials and tribulations of her relationship with her loyal but largely absent husband, her children, and her cold and domineering mother, who comes to live with them when her own mother dies. Kitty dreams of escaping poverty and narrow-mindedness; an avid reader, she engrosses herself in books about distant shores and foreign travel, but it seems as though circumstances will conspire to keep her trapped in the small town in which she was born.