Days Of The Week Books in Order

The Days of the Week books are a loose collection rather than a tightly plotted series, but they share a common world. Each focuses on a young woman stepping out of poverty or constraint in and around Nuneaton, often brushing up against the same children’s home, families and streets as the decades turn.

Mothering Sunday opens the collection in 1884. Sunday Small has never known a life outside the workhouse, where cruelty is routine and the only bright spots are kindly teacher Miss Beau and her friend Daisy. When Sunday attracts the attention of the brutal master, she realises she must escape or be destroyed. She slips away with a promise to return for Daisy and a fragile hope of finding the mother who gave her up.

In The Little Angel, set in 1896, an infant left on the doorstep of Treetops Children’s Home grows into Kitty, a lively girl adored by Sunday Branning, who now runs the place with her husband Tom. Kitty’s beautiful singing voice and trusting nature carry her from the safety of Treetops to the thrill and danger of London’s music halls, where fame and exploitation walk side by side.

A Mother’s Grace follows Grace Kettle, a gentle, devout girl from late‑Victorian Nuneaton whose judge father rules their house with an iron hand. After her chronically ill mother sends her to stay with an aunt in the Welsh coastal town of Pwllheli, Grace discovers open skies, sea air and a new way of living that challenges everything she has been taught.

In The Blessed Child, Wednesday’s child Nessie Carson is left to hold her grieving family together after her mother’s murder and her father’s disappearance. Desperation pushes the siblings into work with a local undertaker, where Nessie becomes entangled with her employer’s secrets and a doctor she can never truly have. Even in the saddest surroundings, she keeps edging toward the light.

A Maiden’s Voyage moves to 1912 London, where capable lady’s maid Flora Butler supports her parents and younger siblings. When her mistress Constance Ogilvie is forced to move to New York after a family tragedy, Flora agrees to sail with her on the Titanic, leaving love and security behind for a crossing that will change everything.

In A Precious Gift Holly Farthing refuses to be pushed into marriage with an older widower. Cut off by her overbearing grandfather, she flees to London, trains as a nurse, falls for compassionate Dr Parkin and later volunteers on the Western Front when devastating news shatters their plans.

Time to Say Goodbye brings the collection into the 1930s. Kathy, who has grown up at Treetops under Sunday and Tom Branning’s care, dreams of nursing and horses; her foster sister Livvy prefers parties and freedom. Tom’s sudden death, financial ruin and the drumbeat of another war uproot the household and force the women to rebuild once more.

These books can be read independently – each heroine has her own complete story – but readers who follow them in order will spot echoes and passing links, from Treetops to familiar surnames. The overall arc moves from Victorian workhouses through the Titanic disaster and the First World War to the shadow of the Second, always bringing the focus back to women who refuse to be defined by the worst things that happen to them.