Molly's mother has disappeared, leaving only a letter in which she asks her daughter to look after her five brothers and sisters. She cannot depend upon her feckless father, who similarly neglects his duties, and she is put in an impossible situation. She must choose between the young man she loves or, forsaking her happiness, look after the children. It is the hardest decision she has ever had to make. And while we are caught up in the drama of Molly's difficult choices, Cox is working her magic with other plot strands that will ultimately become important. Who was the stranger who called upon her mother shortly before she disappeared?

It is a cliché to describe a writer like Cox as a born storyteller, but there is simply no other way to describe her appeal. Nevertheless, other elements are subtly utilised by the author to weave her spell: a powerful sense of time (Looking Back begins in the summer of 1948, and the reader is always conscious of the passing of time); then there are the evocatively drawn locales. Most of all, though, it is the characterisation that remains Cox's trump card, and here, particularly with the beleaguered Molly, she excels herself. The dialogue, too, has the salty taste of authentic working class life:

"I know it sounds terrible", she murmured, "and it makes me look like a hard woman, and happen I am, but if I am it's your dad who made me like that. I'm tired of being as big as a ship from one year's end to another; too heavy to walk, legs like pit props, and so weary at the end of a day I could lay down in the gutter and sleep...that's how it's always been with your dad."