Contemporary Family Life Women Fiction

The warm and wonderful new novel from the natural heir to Maeve Binchy.... Tess used to be happy with her lot: she lives in the idyllic Irish coastal village, Avalon, with her teenage son, Zach, and nine-year-old Kitty, and works in the local antiques shop. Her only regret in life is that everything went so horribly wrong with her first love. Then her marriage falls apart and her first love returns to Avalon.

Ava Ingerson knows what she wants: The beautiful California beach house she just inherited, a career in teaching supplemented with income from her vacation guests, and a life full of friends, fun, and family - right here in Seahaven, California. She’s never moving again, no matter what, so when handsome entrepreneur Samuel Cross arrives to stay at her beach house for two weeks, Ava knows the last thing she should do is act on her attraction to him.

In the seemingly idyllic town of Rundle Junction, Bennie and Walter are preparing to host the wedding of their eldest daughter, Clem. A marriage ceremony at their beloved, rambling home should be the happiest of occasions, but Walter and Bennie have a secret. A new community has moved to Rundle Junction, threatening the social order and forcing Bennie and Walter to confront uncomfortable truths about the lengths they would go to to maintain harmony.

It was a lifetime ago that recently widowed Maggie Flynn was in Wyndham Beach. Now, on the occasion of her fortieth high school reunion, she returns to her hometown on the Massachusetts coast, picking up right where she left off with dear friends Lydia and Emma. But seeing Brett Crawford again stirs other emotions. He shared Maggie’s dreams - and eventually, a shattering secret that drove them apart. Buying her old family home and resettling in Wyndham Beach means a chance to start over for Maggie and her two daughters, but it also means facing her rekindled feelings....

Karen Jones The petite blonde married a Hollywood star, yet she’s the one who spends every day playing a part: the part of a happy wife. A year ago, she agreed to wed a famous actor to defuse rumors about his personal life. Now, her divorce sits just around the corner, along with a five million dollar payout.

Artist Dana Underhill has always been a free spirit, traveling the world, filling her canvases with the mysterious colors of the seas she and her sister have sailed since childhood. Then on a calm, moonlit night an inexplicable “accident” occurs and Dana is called home to Hubbard’s Point to become a mother to her two young nieces, a challenge unlike any she’s ever known. As Dana and the girls struggle to begin a new life - and to find the truth about what happened to Dana’s sister and brother-in-law - help comes in the person of an old childhood friend.

Gabriella Masini: She's a woman haunted by her past, with the scars to prove it. She believes that fairy tales are for other people. An elite matchmaker at Alliance, she's great at crunching numbers, but something doesn't add up with her latest prospective client: a billionaire bad boy with his own secrets.

Jonathan and Rosie have been together so long they finish each other's sentences - so when he (finally) proposes and asks her to move across the country with him, everyone is happily surprised. But when things suddenly unravel, Rosie sends Jonathan packing and moves back home with Soapie, the irascible, opinionated grandmother who raised her.

Sarah Talbot never thought she'd live to see another birthday. But through indomitable will and expert medical care, she has beaten the cancer and reopened her bedding boutique, Cloud Nine. In celebration, Sarah's friends give her a special present: a ride over her upstate New York town in a chartered plane. It is on this flight that Sarah meets Will Burke, a former Navy pilot, whose outward confidence hides the wounds he has yet to heal.

Meg Rosenthal: Matchmaker by day, realist by night, Meg is not about to get swept away by a charming, darkly handsome businessman in a designer suit. She's come to a beautiful, secluded resort to evaluate the private island's potential for her agency, not to ogle its owner. But there's something about the magnetic man that's hard to resist, even for a woman who refuses to fall in love.

The high-born daughter of an English duke, Gwen boasts beauty, blue blood…and an all-consuming desire for her bodyguard, enigmatic Neil MacBain. She came to America to run her sister-in-law’s matchmaking firm. But who’s to say she can’t dream of her own perfect match? Retired marine Neil thought he’d buried the ghosts of his past long ago. But when they return to threaten his new life, Neil’s gorgeous client Gwen is caught in the crossfire. Now, keeping her safe means keeping her close: in his arms - and in his bed.

Beth is running away. With her young son, Leo, to protect, Willow Cottage is the lifeline she so desperately needs. Overlooking the village green in a beautiful Cotswolds idyll, Beth sees a warm, caring and safe place for little Leo. When she finally uncovers the cottage from underneath the boughs of a weeping willow tree, Beth realises this is far more of a project than she bargained for, and the locals are more than a little eccentric!

When a group of neighborhood women gathers, wine in hand, around a fire pit where their backyards meet one Saturday night, most of them are just ecstatic to have discovered that their baby monitors reach that far. It's a rare kid-free night, and they're giddy with it. They drink too much, and the conversation turns personal. By Monday morning, one of them is gone. Everyone knows something about everyone else in the quirky small Ohio town of Yellow Springs, but no one can make sense of the disappearance.

Eager to cheer up her recently widowed gran, Cassie Fitzgerald, visiting from Canada, persuades Lissbeg Library to set up a Skype book club, linking readers on Ireland's Finfarran Peninsula with the US town of Resolve, home to generations of Finfarran emigrants. But when the club decides to read a detective novel, old conflicts on both sides of the ocean are exposed and hidden love affairs come to light. As secrets emerge, Cassie fears she may have done more harm than good. Will the truths she uncovers about her granny Pat's marriage affect her own hopes of finding love?

Grenadine Scotch Wild has only vague memories of the parents she last saw when she was six years old. But she's never forgotten their final, panicked words to her, urging Grenadine to run. The mystery of their disappearance is just one more frayed strand in a life that has lately begun to unravel completely. One year into her rocky marriage to Covey, a well-known investor, he is arrested for fraud and embezzlement. And Grenadine, now a successful collage artist and painter, is facing jail time despite her innocence.

Elderly and in poor health, Mary fulfils her wish to herself to live out her last days on Bruny Island with only her regrets and memories for company. A long time ago, her late husband was the lighthouse keeper on Bruny, and she'd raised a family on the wild windswept island, until terrible circumstances forced them back to civilisation. The long-buried secret that has haunted her for decades now threatens to break free, and she is hoping to banish it once and for all before her time is up.

When Jake and Emily meet, sparks fly. And not the good kind. Emily just wants to keep the world away. She doesn't want anyone to know all the ways her life is messed up. Going to anger management every Saturday, talking to strangers, was not part of the plan. Jake just wants to keep his family together. He's also messed everything up. Going to anger management is now his best hope for bonding with his six-year-old, Alfie.

Grace sees her boyfriend, Henry, everywhere. In the supermarket, on the street, at the graveyard. Only Henry is dead. He died two months earlier, leaving a huge hole in Grace's life and in her heart. But then, Henry turns up to fix the boiler one evening, and Grace can't decide if she's hallucinating or has suddenly developed psychic powers. Grace isn't going mad - the man in front of her is not Henry at all, but someone else who looks uncannily like him.

On the heels of a difficult break-up and a devastating diagnosis, Shakespeare scholar Lizzie Delford decides to take one last lavish vacation on Elba, the sun-kissed island off the Italian coast, with her best friend and his movie-star boyfriend. Once settled into a luxurious seaside resort, Lizzie has to make big decisions about her future, and she needs the one thing she may be running out of: time.

Ford Maddox was running from his past when he came back to Blueberry Cove, Maine, where he'd tasted both heartache and comfort. With feisty Delia O'Reilly there to cheer him on, he couldn't have picked a better place to start over--even if he's determined to do it alone in his island tree house, working to save endangered seabirds...and himself. But when he finds Delia fighting to hold on to her local diner, and all that's best about their little seaside town, Ford has to lend a hand.