The Kilmaster Family Sagas

3 primary works

A Sense of Duty

by Sheelagh Kelly

Published 23 August 1999

The first of a new Yorkshire trilogy of novels by the bestselling author of SHODDY PRINCE and A COMPLICATED WOMAN. Monty Kilmaster, his wife Sarah and their children live in a mining village in Yorkshire. Since Monty's parents died his siblings have been living with him making the house very overcrowded. Following family tradition Monty and his brother Owen have gone to work down the pit and their sisters into service. One by one the girls have married -- except Katherine, or Kit as she is known. Kit, six foot tall, plump and curvaceous, is the sort of woman men find attractive but do not want to marry. Her flamboyant style and preference for men above her own station are a source of embarrassment to her family. Her sisters warn her that she should forget any idea of attracting a man and instead devote herself to the service of others. Feisty Kit, however, has other ideas, and sets out to prove her sisters wrong. But when, in due course, she finds a man to love he lets her down and she is forced to come home in shame with an illegitimate son. Kit has a long and rocky road before her. Has she destroyed all chance of happiness?

Family of the Empire

by Sheelagh Kelly

Published 5 March 2001

The second volume of bestselling saga author Sheelagh Kelly’s new Yorkshire trilogy.

Like his favourite Aunt Kit, Probyn Kilmaster wants more out of life than to follow his father down the pit. The youngest of seven children, six of them girls, Probyn is sick of being ordered around. He has always admired Aunt Kit’s disregard for convention and, using her as inspiration, runs away to join the army, thus alienating himself from the rest of his family. On his first foreign posting he becomes involved with a woman much older than himself who persuades him to go through an unofficial wedding ceremony. But when, like his sisters, his `wife’ starts to boss him around, Probyn searches for escape. Narrowly avoiding court martial, he is sent back to England seeking to rectify his mistakes and make peace with his family.

When he falls in love and marries a young inexperienced woman, Agnes, his family are horrified – she is a Catholic unlike themselves. But Probyn stands by his decision and finds success in his work and domestic life – until the `wife’ from his youth turns up on the doorstep one day, and his world is thrown into turmoil.

A Different Kind of Love

by Sheelagh Kelly

Published 6 January 2003

A gripping saga of love, loss and hope in wartime as we follow the fortunes of the Kilmaster family through the dramatic years of World War I and its aftermath.

The Great War is at its height, and while RSM Probyn Kilmaster is in France, training raw recruits to send to the trenches, in the Yorkshire pit village of Denaby Main his wife, Grace, contends with the hardships of bringing up their children alone. But when Probyn returns safely home at last and it seems life can begin anew, tragedy strikes the Kilmasters, and for Probyn's daughters: Augusta, Maddie, Mims, and especially the sensitive Beata, their father's well-meaning attempt to keep the family together by giving them a stepmother proves more than they can bear – and each has to find her own way to escape the cruelty and oppression that has unwittingly been visited upon them.

'Sheelagh Kelly surely can write' SUNDERLAND ECHO