Tessa O’Leary is the only daughter of a family of fatherless boys. When her mother dies she’s her brothers’ lifeline to survival. So for Tessa the privations of war are just another battle to be fought for a young woman who was born fighting…Elizabeth Harrison is oppressed by her shopkeeper mother’s snobbish expectations and it seems that the coming war could offer her an escape from her family’s emotional ties — but at what cost? THE TIES THAT BIND is the unputdownable story of two young girls in the slumlands of war-wracked Liverpool, bound together by a friendship that surmounts disaster, poverty and heartbreak…