Showing results for "This Is the End" in Historical Fiction

It is the story of a Family halfheartedly searching for a missing relation who does not want to be found, while just off-stage, World War I is raging on the continent. It is a story about ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives in extraordinary times. The things they do are less important than the ways in which they do them: often comic, occasionally tragic, but always touching and true to life. It reminds us that Poetry and Romance can be found anywhere, hidden beneath the surface of the most commonplace things.

In the spring of 1916, we meet orphaned sister and brother Jay and Kew Martin in London. Jay (real name Jane Elizabeth) has run away from her strange, claustrophobic, interfering, well-heeled family to the simplicities of the Brown Borough (otherwise Hackney), to live amongst its working-class people, to a job as a bus conductor, and to discover her own wild self. Kew is on recuperative leave from the War, and manages to find Jay in her humble new abode. She begs him to preserve her newfound freedom and not reveal her whereabouts to their family.

When Minerva Jane Jenkins was just 14 years old, she married a man who moved her to the mountains. He carried with him a small box, which he told her was filled with gold. And when he died 50 years later, he made her promise to keep his secret. She is to tell no one about the box or the treasure it contains. Now 94, Minerva is nearing the end of what has sometimes been a lonely life. But she's kept that secret. Even so, rumors of hidden gold have a way of spreading, and Minerva is visited by a reporter, Del Rankin, who wants to know more of her story.