The Pearl Button Girl

by Annie Murray

ISBN: 9781035019984

Published: 2025

This gritty and heartwarming saga from Annie Murray is the first novel in a new series set in Victorian Birmingham following the trials and triumphs of the Fletcher family. When the father she worships disappears, ten-year-old Ada Fletcher and her family are forced to move to a poor yard in Birmingham. Ada and Elsie, the two eldest children go to work in a local pearl button factory to try and make ends meet. The work is hard and relentless and their mother's death is the final calamity. When Ada returns home one day, she finds her siblings being dragged away to the local workhouse orphanage. Only her quick-thinking neighbour, Sarah Connell, saves Ada from a similar fate by pretending Ada is her child. She finds a new home with her neighbours but the Connell's have problems of their own with too many children, not enough money, and Sarah's increasing reliance on drink to dull the problems of both. But Ada is determined to be more than just a factory girl and find a way to reunite...