Torminster Saga Books in Order

Torminster is Elizabeth Goudge’s dream version of a small English cathedral city, drawn from her childhood in Wells. In these books the lanes, bells and stone towers matter just as much as the people who walk among them.

• A City of Bells* opens the sequence after the Boer War, when wounded soldier Jocelyn Irvin comes to recover with his grandparents in their house off the cathedral close. Their lively grandson Hugh Anthony and adopted granddaughter Henrietta pull him into their games, while a mystery around a missing poet pushes Jocelyn to decide what his future is for.

In Sister of the Angels the focus shifts more fully to Henrietta. At Christmas, with Torminster under snow, she becomes caught up in plans for a new painting in the cathedral and the fate of an embittered ex-prisoner who longs for a fresh start. Choir rehearsals, candlelit services and family rituals give the story a warm, festive glow.

Henrietta's House / The Blue Hills is the most fairy tale like of the trilogy. For Hugh Anthony’s birthday a cavalcade of carriages sets out for a picnic in the hills beyond the town. One by one the groups of guests lose their way, wandering through woods and lanes that seem to answer their secret hopes and fears before bringing them safely together again.

Read as a whole, the Torminster books trace the growing up of both children and adults. Artists, clergymen, dreamers and practical souls all rub shoulders in a city where music, books and the life of the cathedral quietly shape people’s choices.

Expect gentle humour, a strong sense of place and occasional brushings of the miraculous rather than high drama. This is a series for readers who like house and town stories with a spiritual undercurrent, and who enjoy seeing the same community at different seasons of its life.