The Pearl Button Girl

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 have to 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. One day Ada returns home to find 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. Ada is determined to be more than just a factory girl and find a way to reunite with her siblings... One day she finds a way to escape the Connells. And so begins Ada’s journey through her teeming, industrial city in search of
family and of a home and life to call her own.

Annie Murray's The Pearl Button Girl is book one in the Children of Birmingham series, starting in Victorian Birmingham and following the trials and triumphs of the Fletcher family.