Prologue: March 2020 -- VE Day, 8th May 1945 -- The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, 2nd June 1953 -- The World Cup final: England v. West Germany, 30th July 1966 -- The investiture of Charles, Prince of Wales, 1st July 1969 -- The wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer, 29th July 1981 -- The funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, 6th September 1997 -- The 75th anniversary of VE Day, 8th May 2020

"Bournville is a quiet village in the heart of England famous for its chocolate. For eleven-year-old Mary, it is the center of her world, the place where most of her family's friends and neighbors have worked for decades and where the streets smell faintly of chocolate. During the next three-quarters of a century, Mary will have children and grandchildren and great-children. She will live through the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and the 1966 World Cup final (the last time England won), royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, and Bournville itself will gradually disappear into the sprawl of the growing city of Birmingham. As we travel through seventy-five years of social change, from James Bond to Princess Diana, and from wartime nostalgia to the World Wide Web, one pressing question starts to emerge: will these changing times bring Mary's family and their country closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before?" --From publisher's website