A compelling story of deep emotion and tangled family relationships that hide a dreadful secret. Pretty Alice Lacey couldn¿t be more different from her sister-in-law, bitter, ambitious Cora. Alice is married to John, Cora to his hapless younger brother, Billie. Both women give birth to sons on one chaotic night in 1940. But Cora's jealousy and resentment lead her to swap her puny baby for Alice's beautiful son. Alice, her marriage in tatters because the badly burned John rejects her, borrows money from Cora in order to purchase the lease of the tiny hairdresser where she works. Alice is talented; the business thrives and a chain of salons becomes Laceys of Liverpool. Relationships between the cousins Cormac and Maurice, their parents, Alice's three girls and their eventual husbands and children enrich this engrossing saga and give a unique picture of Liverpool in the last sixty years of the twentieth century.