Will he ever find what he's looking for? Oliver Wainwright is still a boy when he first sets eyes on the fair, delicate Florence - the aristocratic granddaughter of Sir Philip Oldfield. And, determined never to be a servant or follow in his father's footsteps as a quarry worker on the Oldfield estate, he runs away to Middlefield, that very day. Slowly but surely, he sets about becoming a man of property and a cotton industry king. He works single-mindedly to achieve his ambition - until he meets Rosie, a married mill hand who distracts him with her dark, warm beauty. Has Oliver finally found what he really wanted all along? Set against a background of the Lancashire/Cheshire cotton industry, The Runaway is a magnificent saga of a young man's rise to power, his passion and poverty, feuds and triumphs and the two very different women who shape his life.