1854. Britain slides unprepared into the Crimean War. Lucy Harvington, who knows little beyond how to play the piano, has accompanied her handsome impetuous officer husband to the battlefields. She’s way out of her depth, so if he doesn’t survive what will become of her?

Dorothea Gray, a nurse at London’s Westminster Hospital, is determined to follow her little sister Lucy to the front and serve her country alongside her heroine Florence Nightingale and the pioneering nurses already risking their lives out there.

Neither sister could have known the horrors awaiting – the brutal cold, the appalling diseases, the hideous injuries … nor could they have guessed the risks they will have to take, the forbidden passions they will taste, and the simple heart-breaking fact they may never meet again …