Vibrant and vivacious, Sarah Onion takes it upon herself to find employment when she is orphaned at nineteen. She becomes an integral part of Charles and Ruth Lane's household as governess to their four small children, but at what cost?

The First World War soon unleashes calamity on the whole family. Charles enlists in the army and is sent to France, Ruth's heart disease gets increasingly worse, their youngest daughter becomes increasingly difficult to deal with and all the while Sarah is falling in love.

Carnegie Medal winning author Noel Streatfeild plunges her reader into tragedy after tragedy but always keeps a light at the end of the tunnel in her wartime family novel, A Shepherdess of Sheep.