The Best of Daughters by Dilly Court

I have found a new favorite author – Dilly Court. Dilly Court is an English novelist who writes wonderful romantic historic fiction. I read The Best of Daughters while we were camping over Labor Day weekend and I loved it!


If you are a fan of Downton Abbey, like me, you will appreciate the setting of The Best of Daughters. Daisy Lennox is the daughter of a well to do stock broker growing up in Edwardian England. She is rich, beautiful, and privileged, but she wants more out of life. She joins the suffragette movement to fight for woman’s rights, but she finds her world soon crashing down when her father’s business partner leaves the country with all of the firm’s money.

Daisy seeks to reinvent herself in the country and finds herself physically attracted to Bowman, the mechanic that is fixing her father’s car. She also finds that the entire neighborhood is under Bowman’s spell. Daisy’s mother’s dream is that Daisy will marry her childhood friend, Rupert. While Rupert is wonderful and attractive, Daisy finds herself wishing for the spark that she finds with Bowman. WWI soon intervenes and Daisy finds herself making hard choices, but also doing the best that she can for her friends and her family.

I loved the twists and turns that the novel took with the fate of Daisy and her friends and family. I had a very hard time putting this book down, I’m just glad it was a vacation weekend. I loved the romance, but I really loved the setting and the hard realities that WWI put everyone through. Having Daisy as a nurse on the front experiencing it first hand was a wonderful narrative, but it was also sad to read at times. As WWI drifts further back in time, it’s easy to forget the horror that it really was.

I read The Best of Daughters as part of the TLC book tour. For more on this book and The Lady’s Maid check out the TLC website. http://tlcbooktours.com/2013/06/dilly-court-author-of-the-best-of-daughters-and-the-ladys-maid-on-tour-augustseptember-2013/

Unfortunately, you cannot buy a hardcover copy of Dilly Court’s books in the United States. The good news is that you can purchase eBooks of her novels at the following site:

Great British Reads: Historical and Contemporary eBooks from across the pond:

http://www.greatbritishreads.com/