Hopscotch Summer Books in Order

The Hopscotch Summer trilogy follows a small group of Birmingham girls from a 1930s classroom through the upheavals of the Second World War and into the hard work of rebuilding their lives in peace. Across the three books you see friendships tested, families reshaped and young women fighting for choices that once seemed out of reach.

A Hopscotch Summer is the starting point, set in the poor district of Nechells in the 1930s. Emma Brown is a lively, responsible girl whose usual cheer is worn thin by a new baby, a mother slipping into depression and a father who increasingly takes refuge in drink. She does her best to keep the household running, playing with younger children in the street between chores, but the cracks keep widening. When her mother is sent away to stay with a domineering sister across the city, Emma embarks on a risky journey to bring her home, discovering just how fragile her family really is.

Soldier Girl shifts focus to Molly Fox, one of Emma's classmates, who has grown up under a brutal grandfather and an alcoholic mother. Desperate to escape the secrets and shame of home, she joins the Auxiliary Territorial Service and finds in the army a strange mix of discipline, comradeship and opportunity. At first the barracks seem a disaster, but as Molly learns new skills and builds friendships she tastes a kind of independence she has never known. War, however, brings loss as well as growth, and news from Birmingham forces her to confront the past she thought she had left behind.

All the Days of Our Lives reunites Emma, Molly and their friend Katie O'Neill in the late 1940s, when the war is officially over but its impact is still everywhere. Katie, marked by a difficult childhood and a hungry need for love, finds herself a young single mother, judged by neighbours and struggling to manage alone. Emma has spent the war in Birmingham, longing for her husband Norm to come home and meet the son he has never seen, only to find that peacetime brings new strains and disappointments. Molly, after finding purpose in the forces, now roams between guesthouses and holiday camps, looking for work and somewhere she can finally settle.

Throughout the trilogy, the city itself is a constant presence: classrooms and bomb shelters, factory yards and cramped back-to-backs, then the promise of new housing and changing expectations in the post-war years. The tone is warm but honest about poverty, trauma and the limits placed on girls from working-class backgrounds. Emma, Molly and Katie face different trials, yet their long friendship gives them a thread of continuity as the world around them shifts. Read in order, the books offer the satisfying sweep of seeing lives unfold from childhood hopscotch games to adult responsibilities and second chances.