Weights and Measures is an unhurried historical novel that ends as surprisingly for the characters as the reader. It follows an outwardly ordinary family, living in a working class suburb of Swansea, during the early days of World War II, exploring inner lives of fear, passion, and hope. 

Jim Froom is hiding things: his gambling, his black market antics, the fact that now his son William has enlisted, he is haunted afresh by the carnage of the Great War. Mary Froom is a capable woman, perpetually frustrated. Mother to four - five if she counts Jim, who needs watching too - guiltily, she lives for the day when her youngest will be out from under her feet at primary school. Teddy is thirteen, but already obliged to fill William's shoes. Working in the family butcher's shop, he dreams of becoming a surgeon, a dream as unattainable as that of his sister Dora, eldest Froom child, returned to Swansea from a life of relative freedom in London…  

Preoccupied with their secrets, they live in almost suspended animation, waiting for an end to the weeks and months of apparent nothing – the so-called ‘phoney war.’ None of them are prepared for the real war when it begins – devastating and senseless, reconfiguring their lives forever. But out of tragedy, there is a speck of hope… 

“Against the epic backdrop of the Second World War, Fraser’s intimate love letter to Swansea bursts with passion, humour, and heart—a sweeping family saga so compelling readers won’t want to put it down.”

Euros Lyn, BAFTA-winning Film and Television Director