Time will tell - Sally Worboyes

September 1953, London's East End - Edie Birch, who believes herself to be a war widow, has finally allowed herself to fall in love again. Engaged to be married, she is happily planning her wedding day.

But fate has a blow in store - her fifteen-year-old daughter, Maggie, is pregnant.

A plan has been hatched to stop her daughter from falling from grace. Hidden away above an Italian caf in Islington until she is ready to give birth, Maggie works long hours behind the scene while her mother Edie, in East London, feigns pregnancy. The charade works until the baby arrives and hard decisions are to be made.

Can Maggie return home and cope with the pretence of her own child being her brother? And will her boyfriend's close Italian family agree to give up their grandson? Worse still, will the truth out once Edie's first husband turns up to demand his rights as grandfather?

Sally Worboyes was born and grew up in Stepney with four brothers and a sister, and she brings some of the raw history of her own family background to her East End sagas. She now lives in Norfolk with her husband, with whom she has three grown-up children. She has written several plays which have been broadcast on Anglia Television and Radio Four. She also adapted her own play and novel, WILD HOPS, as a musical, The Hop Pickers.

'Great stuff' - Essex Chronicle

Daily Mail

Sizzles with passion
Guardian

A rich, vivid, three-dimensional and gutsy narrative
Eastern Daily Press

She brings the East End to life
Barbara Windsor

A vivid evocation of a way of life
East Anglian Daily Times