'In 1933, in the heart of Black Country, England, Cradle Cross is a town out of time, still reeling from the Great War yet linked to a distant past of ancient customs as well as to a button
factory in terminal decline. Into this exotically grim environment arrives Isa Fly, a mysterious white-haired young woman from the coast. She is a magnetic presence who exerts a romantic pull
on everyone she meets. Ruby Tailor, motherless and thirteen years old, is instantly drawn to her, as is Captin, the proprietor of the local chip shop, a fifty-year-old bachelor and father
figure to Ruby, and as is Truda Blick, the Oxford-educated spinster who's inherited the failing button factory. But Isa is viewed with increasing suspicion by the tight-knit women of Cradle
Cross, who come to see her as the cause of the town's accelerating misfortunes and, ultimately, fear her as a witch'--Publisher's description.
