The Christian message of redemption runs through the books of late bestselling author Barbara Taylor Bradford

Barbara Taylor Bradford died on the 24th November aged 91. Author Ruth Leigh shares her reflections and the impact Barbara’s books had on her life.

When Barbara Taylor Bradford’s death was announced, I waited for the inevitable phrase and sure enough, there it was. “An overnight success.” I smiled wryly to myself. As a fiction author, I’ve been waiting for some time to make the joke, “I’ve been working for years to become an overnight success.”

Her first book, A Woman of Substance, came out in 1979 when I was thirteen. I devoured it and eagerly awaited the sequel. Compared to the other must-reads that year (Flowers in the Attic with the creepy grandmother, iffy sibling relationship and dodgy mother, and The Thorn Birds with its racy goings on in faraway Australia), Barbara Taylor Bradford was in a different league. Her working class heroine battled single parenthood, poverty and betrayal, yet kept going, building up her business from nothing. There were themes of forgiveness and redemption running through her story which I didn’t notice as a schoolgirl but do today as a woman of faith.