As the world teeters on the brink of war, one woman’s steadfast heart will see her through. The stirring conclusion to the epic Claybourne trilogy.

Spanning the years from 1925 through 1945, Lily Claybourne, the Countess of Gloucester, forges her path after her struggles during World War I.

Despite difficulties with her marriage, her dreams remain intact, and she strives to make them a reality. She enters into a tumultuous time in her life, filled with great achievement and heartbreaking loss. Through it all, Lily continues to grow, and refuses to let misfortune block her way.

This is an engaging finale to the much-loved trilogy which began in 1914, at the beginning of the Great War. Lily moves through the 1930s and 40s with renewed purpose and strength.

In the end, the reader learns what becomes of each character with whom they have become intimately acquainted in this engrossing chronicle of a British family’s life in the first half of the twentieth century.

Claybourne Trilogy

1. The White Feather
2. The White Butterfly
3. White Cliffs of Dover

Enthralling & Engaging!

It’s an unfortunate part of being a book blogger that you cannot read every book out there – it’s just not possible, but this is one series I really wish I had been in on from the very beginning. However, this third book in trilogy is a very easy stand-alone read.

Beginning with Lily’s graduation this novel maps the years from 1925 to 1945 focussing on both her professional achievements and the lives of her family, all hand-in-hand with the war years.

This is a very engaging and engrossing read; I found myself racing through the pages, enthralled with both the characters and the story. I do enjoy a good read about the second world war and this was exactly that; there is plenty to keep the reader’s attention and, while I didn’t feel that I had missed out by not reading the first two books, it would have increased my enjoyment three-fold. Whilst this is far from the story of an ordinary British Family, it is a fine, entertaining tale and one I’m happy to recommend and give four stars.

My thanks to Maria Inot of TCK Publishing for my copy; this is – as always – my honest, original and unbiased review.

Tags: historical family saga, WWII

• Format: ebook, paperback, audiobook
• Size: 157 pages
• Publisher: TCK Publishing
• Publication Date: 28 July 2014
• Book Links:
• https://www.goodreads.com
• https://play.google.com
• https://www.barnesandnoble.com
• https://uk.bookshop.org
• https://www.foyles.co.uk
• https://www.kobo.com
• https://www.waterstones.com
• https://wordery.com
• https://www.amazon.co.uk

Author Details

Mary Christian Payne was highly successful in several management positions in Fortune 500 Companies in New York City, St. Louis, Missouri, Orlando Florida, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work included grant writing, and designing and writing training manuals for executive training programs.

She left the corporate world, and became Director of Career Development at the Women’ Resource Center at the University of Tulsa where she designed a program that enabled hundreds of adult women to return to college and better their lives. She received the Mayor’s Pinnacle Award in 1993 for this achievement. Mary left that position when the Center closed, and then opened her own Career Counseling Center. She retired from corporate work in 2008 to pursue her dreams of becoming an author.

Mary Christian Payne became a best selling author at the age of 71 with the help of her publisher, Tom Corson-Knowles. All of her life, she had wanted to write, and had received accolades for her unpublished work. She was encouraged in college, and writing was a significant part of the various jobs she held.

In 2013, she read Tom Corson-Knowles book about publishing on Kindle. She wrote to him and he telephoned her. The rest is history. Since that time, she has published twelve books, with several more scheduled to be released soon.

Mary lost her husband in 2015 to cancer after 33 years of marriage. The grief process brought a lull to her writing, but she found that putting words on paper helped immensely. She is now in the process of writing her fourth novel since his death. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with her beloved Maltese dog and a newly adopted stray kitten.

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