Sad to finish this wonderful trilogy but it was also time to bring the family saga to a close. Wonderful sense of family and social evolution set in the onslaught of the industrial revolution with all of its accompanying displacement of ideas and mores. Delderfield does his historical homework meticulously, occasionally numbingly so, but through it all the grandeur of the characters and the sweep of the story carried me captivatingly onward. It is romanticized fiction - and sometimes the romance is overdrawn and overdone. But one happily makes allowance for that because we want at least in imagination to make room for larger than life. There are no enduring truths to the saga but there is more than a passing nod throughout to the indomitability of the human spirit - at least as embodied in Adam Swan's indefatigable entrepreneurial gusto.