Last Goodbye (Finnerty)

The Last Goodbye
Caroline Finnerty, 2014
Poolbeg Press
360 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781842236185


Summary
Sometimes the decisions we make can last a lifetime . . . and sometimes we cannot shake off the shackles of decisions made by others in the past.

Kate Flynn has spent her whole life running away. She reckons the best decision she ever made was to leave Ireland the day after she finished school. Having seldom returned since, she would be perfectly happy if she never had to go back there. She is happy in London where she runs a successful photography gallery with her best friend Nat, though their relationship is going through a rocky patch since Nat began an affair with a married man.

When Kate becomes pregnant and her partner Ben persuades her to make the trip home, she is forced to confront everything she left behind and memories of Eva, the mother she feels betrayed her. Kate finds it impossible to forgive Eva who chose to refuse cancer treatment while pregnant and died, leaving a young family motherless.

Do some wounds go too deep to ever heal? Must Eva's Choice forever deny Kate real happiness?

The Last Goodbye is a powerful story of love and loss, forgiveness and new beginnings—a heart-wrenching and emotional page-turner for mothers and daughters everywhere. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 6, 1980
• Where—Kildare, Ireland
• Education—N/A
• Currently—Kildare, Ireland


Caroline Finnerty is an Irish author and freelance writer living on the banks of the Grand Canal in the County Kildare countryside with her husband, their three young children and their dog. She is the author of In a Moment, The Last Goodbye, and Into the Night Sky. She also compiled the charity anthology If I Was a Child Again in aid of Barnardos.

Caroline has written articles for The Irish Daily Mail, The Star, Woman’s Way Magazine, as well as several parenting magazines. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.
Follow Caroline on Facebook.

Book Reviews
Wonderfully drawn and intensely moving.
Irish Independent


Any author who can have her readers rooting for a heroine as headstrong, stubborn and bloody-minded as Finnerty’s deserves credit; with The Last Goodbye she merits praise indeed.
Independent Living

Discussion Questions
1. Eva is faced with a deeply difficult dilemma. Do you think that Eva’s decision was selfless? Do you think she considered the needs of her three older children adequately?

2. Do you believe that the tendency to put a child’s needs before our own, is a trait unique to mothers?

3. Kate still carries a lot of anger towards her mother but do you think Kate is more similar to her mother than she would like to admit? What characteristics do they share?

4. What are your feelings about Nat’s relationship with Will?

5. Do you agree with Kate’s assertion that there are lots of "ones" out there for us or would you agree with Nat’s more romantic view that you can love a lot of people but that there is an ultimate one out there for all of us?

6. Do you think Will made the right decision to choose his marriage and his family’s well being over a future with Nat?

7. Ben has a difficult and problematic relationship with his father. How damaging do you think the weight of a parent’s expectations can be on a child?

8. What did you think of Aoife’s relationship with her grandmother Josephine?

9. What did you think of Noel’s relationship with Aoife? Do you think that he should have raised her with her brothers or was he right to let her stay with Josephine as happens in the story?

10. What were your feelings towards Kate at the start of the novel? Did they change towards the end?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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