A wonderful Christmas gift full of nostalgia and charm. Elsie Grimshaw lives in one of the worst streets in Weatherfield and is desperate to escape from life at home with a brutal father and the drudgery of working at the local mill. Grabbing at the slim chances that come her way, Elsie goes through the heartbreak of first love and her marriage to bad boy Arnold Tanner at only 16 years old and emerges, if not much older, then certainly wiser.

December 1944, and the residents of Beckindale can't believe they're going through another wartime Christmas - though the success of the D-Day landings earlier in the year has brought some hope to the village. The women of Emmerdale are navigating their own lives, loves and dreams - and as the war draws to a close, they realise things will never be the same again. The Emmerdale girls are going to learn things are never dull where love is involved.

World War II wages on. Rationing, blackouts, evacuees and military training camps have become the norm in the village of Beckindale, but happiness has been found during these hard times. Lily Dingle is getting married, Annie Pearson has returned after volunteering with the Wrens and there are new neighbours to get to know...including a female vet, of all things.   

Fiction to coincide with a three-part historical Emmerdale spin-off show airing on ITV this autumn. The show is billed as a captivating 8 p.m. series in which cast members mark 100 years since the end of the Great War by uncovering the hidden stories of their WW1 counterparts, embarking on an immersive journey to experience a Yorkshire village at war and creating a special Armistice celebration.

It’s 1940, and war has broken out. It is midnight at the turn of the year, and Walter Gabriel speaks the same line that opened the very first radio episode - 'And a Happy New Year to you all!' For Ambridge, a village in the heart of the English countryside, this year will bring change in ways no one was expecting.

The war is over, but trouble is brewing.... Wynsdown, 1949. In the small Somerset village of Wynsdown, Charlotte Shepherd is happily married and now feels settled in her adopted home after arriving from Germany on the Kindertransport as a child during the war. Meanwhile, the squire's fighter pilot son, Felix, has returned to the village with a fiancée in tow. Daphne is beautiful, charming...and harbouring secrets. After meeting during the war, Felix knows some of Daphne's past....

Maureen Jackson is a prisoner of her father's blackmail. Three years ago, she'd been hoping to marry Rory, the man of her dreams. However, after her mother's death, Maureen was left to care for her overbearing father. Now Rory is back in London with his pregnant wife and reminds Maureen of the life that should have been hers. With the war looming, Janet Ashley hopes to marry her sweetheart Mike, but her father refuses to grant them his blessing. Janet finds herself pregnant and her mother Peggy is determined to hold her family together.

When Adelaide Anson-Gravetty finds out her father is not the man who raised her, she is both shocked and intrigued. Determined to find out more about her new family, she travels to the convent of Our Lady of Mercy in France to meet her aunt, the Reverend Mother. But when France falls to the German army, Adelaide and the nuns are soon in the thick of a war that threatens both their beliefs and their lives. 

The first fascinating part of Joanna Toye's delightful trilogy about life in Ambridge. Covering the years 1951-1967, Family Ties introduces the main characters: Dan, Doris, Phil, Christine, Jack and Peggy and their children, Walter Gabriel, the Fairbrothers and Tom Forrest. The early years are action-packed: Phil's courtship and marriage to Grace and her tragic death; his subsequent marriage to Jill and the birth of their children; Jack's drinking problem and later, the birth of Jennifer's illegitimate baby.

Lavender Road boasts a pawnbroker, a pub, two rows of terraced working class homes and, at one end, the big house owned by the local brewer. When war breaks out, the lives and fortunes of the families who live in Lavender Road are changed out of all recognition. For Joyce, it means a struggle to keep food on the family table; for Jen it may mean the end of her dream to become an actress; and for Pam, there is the sickening seesaw of emotions as she fights attraction to her handsome lodger and a growing distance from a husband who is judged not fit to enlist.

Three sisters in 1920s struggle to make ends meet and protect their mother from their violent father. Milly works in Southwells jam factory. Elsie dreams of a career on the stage, while little Amy runs wild with her friends. All three of the girls fear the unforgiving temper of their father and their courageous attempts to protect their defenseless mother will have dramatic, disastrous consequences for them all.

From his humble Yorkshire childhood, via the battlefields of Burma and the peaks of the Himalayas, to becoming the NHS and the nation's hero during Lockdown, Captain Tom Moore's story is a journey for all of us. Who is Captain Sir Tom Moore? You've seen him on the television walking the length of his garden. A frail elderly man, doing his bit at a time of crisis. But he wasn't always like this. Where did he come from? Where was he made?

It wasn't a privileged childhood, but it was a happy one. Sybil and Lizzie Cream, brought up in a fisherman's cottage on the edge of the cold North Sea, were content to leave privilege where it belonged: with their friends the Wintertons. Christina Winterton was the same age as Sybil, and the two girls were inseparable, but it was Lizzie whom Ralph Winterton, three years older, found irresistible. Then war came to East Anglia, and so did Manchester-born Fenn Kitzmann, now of the American Army Air Force.

When the Todds move into a flat on the Scotland Road, they are strangers to city life: their previous home was a canal barge. Harry gets a job as warehouse manager and his wife, Martha, works in a grocer’s shop whilst Seraphina trains as a teacher, Angela works in Bunney’s Department Store and young Evie starts at regular school. Then circumstances change, and Seraphina takes a job in Lyon’s Corner House. Customers vie for her favours, including an old friend, Toby.... 

Thirteen-year-old Lisa escapes from Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport and arrives in England in August 1939. She can't speak a word of English, and among her meagre belongings is one precious photograph of her family. But when the Blitz blows her new home apart, she wakes up in hospital with no memory of who she is. The authorities give her a new name and despatch her to a children's home. With the war in full swing, what will become of Lisa now?