A young disabled girl and her brother are evacuated from London to the English countryside during World War II, where they find life to be much sweeter away from their abusive mother.

Eleven-year-old Ada's clubfoot has been fixed at last, and she knows now that she's not what her mother said she was - damaged and deranged. But soon Ada learns that she's not a daughter anymore either. Who is she now? World War II rages on, and Ada and her brother move with their guardian, Susan, into a cottage with the iron-face Lady Thorton and her daughter. Life in the crowded home is tense. Then Ruth moves in. Ruth, a Jewish girl, from Germany....

"A young boy, his great-uncle, and a friendly gorilla from the London Zoo uncover a Nazi plot in wartime Britain"--

As World War II begins, London orphan Emmie is unhappy to be evacuated to an old mansion in the Yorkshire countryside until she starts discovering the secrets of the house--a boy crying at night, a diary written by a girl named Mary, and a very secret garden.

The lives of two sets of best friends, Kate and Ruby in England and Erik and Hans in Germany, as well as a stray dog in London are brought together in unexpected ways during World War II.

Before the start of World War II, ten-year-old Ziska Mangold, who has Jewish ancestors but has been raised as a Protestant, is taken out of Nazi Germany on one of the Kindertransport trains, to live in London with a Jewish family, where she learns about Judaism and endures the hardships of war while attempting to keep in touch with her parents, who are trying to survive in Holland.

Now grown, Andy tells the story of the summer of 1949 when, embittered after enduring injustice at their English school and disappointed by the adults in their lives, he and his friends wrestle with thoughts of revenge and deal with several life-changing secrets.

Fourteen-year-old Johnny Trott, a bell-boy at London's Savoy Hotel in 1912, becomes caregiver to Kaspar Kandinsky, the Prince of Cats, and soon the two are stowing away on the Titanic, where they are befriended by the Stanton family of New York.

In 1940 England, stuck in a train tunnel while German fighter jets fly overhead, Barney hears an unlikely story of a highly decorated World War I soldier who once had a chance to kill young Adolf Hitler.