Time to Say Goodbye by Rosie Goodwin: Emotional, action-packed dramas and fascinating facts about the realities of life for women over the last 150 years - book review -

After the death of her beloved husband Tom, Sunday Branning thought things couldn’t get any worse… but there’s a war on the horizon and life has never seemed so uncertain.

In the final chapter of her much-loved popular Days of the Week family sagas, master storyteller Rosie Goodwin makes a welcome return to the compelling story of Sunday Small, the young girl who stole readers’ hearts in the opening book of the series, Mothering Sunday.

A former social worker and foster mother, Goodwin has written over thirty beautiful sagas, and was awarded the rights to follow three of the late, great Tyneside writer Catherine Cookson’s trilogies with her own sequels.

However, the countryside around Nuneaton in Warwickshire has always been the inspiration for Goodwin’s own tales of hardship, love and hope, and here we catch up with Sunday who was abandoned at birth in 1870 at the Nuneaton Union Workhouse.

Now aged 60, Sunday has come a long way since those early years of privation and cruelty. As a teenager, she was taken under the wing of a kindly young teacher, but was forced to leave behind the workhouse and everything and everybody she had ever known when she attracted the unwelcome attention of the workhouse master.

She went on to marry her childhood sweetheart, Tom Branning, and they own Treetops Manor in the Warwickshire countryside where Tom still manages his successful horse stud business and Sunday once ran a loving foster home for troubled children.

Treetops is also home to Tom and Sunday’s daughter, Livvy, who has grown up surrounded by the horses she adores, and Kathy, the couple’s 16-year-old foster daughter who they have brought up as if she was their own.

But the Branning family is overwhelmed with despair when Tom dies instantly in a riding accident and five years later, the running of the estate, which the still grief-stricken Sunday has left in the hands of Tom’s illegitimate son Ben, is now in chaos.

Sunday is keen to see both her girls married, but Livvy, who is doing a secretarial course, has no intentions of settling down and would much rather spend time with her friends. And when Kathy, who is training to be a nurse, falls for the wrong man, her ambitions are soon forgotten as she embarks on a secret affair.

As their financial difficulties begin to mount, the women of Treetops are forced to leave their home… and their world is about to be turned upside down yet again as the drums of war beat ever louder.

Time to Say Goodbye is the perfect ending to what has been an enchanting reading experience, with each story featuring a cast of superbly drawn characters (some of whom have reappeared in this final curtain call), emotional, action-packed dramas, and fascinating facts about the realities of life for women over the last 150 years.

The joys of friendship, and the strength that comes from close family relationships, have always taken centre stage, all acutely observed with Goodwin’s warmth, wisdom and insight.

And the glittering good news is that Goodwin is already working on a new series, The Precious Stones collection, in which each main character will be named after a gemstone. Look out for Opal’s story… coming soon!

(Zaffre, hardback, £12.99)