Time of Hope is the first chronological entry in C. P. Snow's series of novels Strangers and Brothers, and the third to be published.

He works hard, befriends lawyers (including George Passant, whose story is told in the second book) and plans to become a solicitor.

With great labour, he staves off illness and begins his practice, but his life is disrupted by his courting of Sheila Knight, an unstable woman who does not love him.

He recognises that they are not suited for each other, but he is determined to marry her, and he frightens away another man, whom she is fond of, by telling him about her difficult personality.

The link with its predecessor, The Light and the Dark is in the person of Lewis Eliot, narrator in that novel of a period just beyond that encompassed in Time of Hope.