The heartbreaking and completely unputdownable instant New York Times bestseller and Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick about the pain and sacrifice of forbidden love, the lengths a mother will go to protect her child, and survival against the toughest of odds.

Philadelphia, 1948: Fifteen-year-old Ruby‘s dreams are almost within reach. She’s going to be the first in her family to attend college, despite having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising her only daughter. But falling madly in love with the one boy she is forbidden from threatens to pull Ruby back into poverty and desperation. When she’s imprisoned in a home for unwed mothers – locked in the House of Eve with other ‘fallen girls’ – everything she’s worked so hard for starts slipping through her fingers.

Washington, DC, 1948: Eleanor arrives in the city with ambition, hope and a past she’s trying her hardest to run from. When she meets William at Howard University, with his inky black eyes and broad shoulders, it’s love at first sight. But William hails from one of Washington, DC’s elite Black families, who don’t let just anyone into their inner circle – especially not a girl from ‘the wrong side of the tracks’. Eleanor hopes that a baby will mean they finally accept her, and that her secrets won’t see the light of day – but fate has other plans in store…

In the dawn of the 1950s, Ruby and Eleanor are complete strangers – until their paths unexpectedly collide. Forced to make the most heartbreaking decisions of their lives, will their choices save them… or be their undoing?

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