Dilly's Story Books in Order

Dilly’s Story is a three-book family saga that begins with a mother’s desperate act and follows its consequences across the years, through war, grief and the stubborn pull of love.

In Dilly’s Sacrifice, Dilly Carey is already exhausted. Her husband can’t work, there are four hungry children at home, and a new baby has just arrived. With no money left and no welfare state to fall back on, she walks up to the big house in the night and leaves her newborn daughter on the Farthing family’s doorstep. The Farthings, who have just lost a child to measles, adopt the baby and offer Dilly a job as a maid. That single choice binds the families together as the First World War tears through their sons and shreds any illusion of safety.

Dilly’s Lass picks up after the war. Dilly is still living with the weight of that decision when Olivia, the daughter she gave away, appears on her doorstep with a baby of her own and a secret she can share with no one else. Dilly is overjoyed to have her child back in any form, but keeping Olivia’s confidence means hiding the truth from Max Farthing, the man who raised Olivia and the man Dilly has quietly loved for years. The book is as much about the Farthing household trying to rebuild after wartime losses as it is about Dilly’s private hopes.

In Dilly’s Hope, the final volume, Dilly is a widowed matriarch surrounded by children and grandchildren. Outwardly her life is secure, yet she still aches over the baby she once surrendered and the son she lost on the Western Front. A journey to her boy’s grave on the old battlefields and a reckoning with the secrets she has kept open the door to late-in-life romance and a gentler peace.

Across the trilogy Goodwin moves the family through changing times – from pre-war poverty, through the trenches and their aftermath, into the hesitant prosperity of the interwar years. Class boundaries blur and shift as Dilly travels between her own cramped home and the Farthings’ world of maids and parlours, but the emotional heart of the series is smaller and more intimate: a mother’s guilt, a daughter’s confusion and the quieter love that grows between people who choose one another.

Each novel focuses on a different phase of the Carey–Farthing tangle, so you can read them alone, but taken together they deliver a full, satisfying sweep from sacrifice to reconciliation.