Smiling Through Tears is a tale of two friends who are facing difficult situations. Reverend Alasdair Sommersby is losing his fight with cancer. Frances Campbell lives with the threat of violence.
The setting of Smiling Through Tears is what drives this novel. Such a tale of domestic abuse, violence and suffering seems out of place amidst the beauty of the Yorkshire Dales, tea-room gentility, the febrile atmosphere of the race course, and garden fête geniality, but that, of course, is the point.
