In Pianos and Flowers we are invited to glimpse a world long departed. In these stories, inspired by long-lost photographs, the lives of the people in the frame are imagined and then explored, layer by layer.Three sisters brought up in Penang, caught in the tide of war.A group of small boys in a Glasgow slum – their childhood blighted by poverty, their adult lives taking very different paths.A young woman’s search for love in the unlikely realm of Egyptian antiquities.And through all of these photographs, and all of these stories, there runs the same refrain: the possibilities of love, of friendship, of happiness lie before us.