Rural Life

On a solo ski vacation in Canyon Mines, Colorado, Tucker has a love-hate relationship with his wealth, spending indiscriminately while skiing fearlessly and preparing to conquer the overgrown slope of Hidden Run, a dangerous run not attempted in decades. As genealogist Jillian tries to uncover enough of Tucker's family tree to understand his charming nature but reckless resolve, Jillian's equally charming father, Nolan, cajoles Tucker into giving him ski lessons to get him talking about the suspicious circumstances surrounding his grandfather's life in St. Louis in the 1930s.

If life were fair, Jam Gallahue would still be at home in New Jersey with her sweet British boyfriend, Reeve Maxfield. She'd be watching old comedy sketches with him. She'd be kissing him in the library stacks. She certainly wouldn't be at The Wooden Barn, a therapeutic boarding school in rural Vermont, living with a weird roommate, and signed up for an exclusive, mysterious class called Special Topics in English. But life isn't fair, and Reeve Maxfield is dead.

When Frank Woods at number 79 Primrose Square comes home to a surprise birthday party thrown by his wife and adoring children, it is his guests who get the real surprise. Finding himself alone, he befriends the cantankerous Miss Hardcastle, who hasn't left her home for decades, and Emily Dunne - fresh out of rehab and desperate to make amends. As gossip spreads through Primrose Square, every relationship is tested, and nothing in this close-knit community will ever be the same again....

It’s been 17 years since the tragic summer the McAvoy sisters fell apart. Lindy, the wild one, left home, carved out a new life in the city, and never looked back. Delia, the sister who stayed, became a mother herself, raising her daughters and running the family shop in their small Ohio hometown on the shores of Lake Erie. But now, with their mother’s ailing health and a rebellious teenager to rein in, Delia has no choice but to welcome Lindy home.

Amanda is a new mother, and she is breaking. After a fight with her partner, she puts the baby in the car and drives from Queens to her hometown in rural Ohio, where she shows up unannounced on the doorstep of her estranged childhood best friend. Amanda thought that she had left Carrie firmly in the past. After their friendship ended, their lives diverged radically: Carrie had a baby the summer after high school, became a successful tattoo artist, and never escaped Ohio’s conservative grid of close-cut grass.

Diane needs to start over again. After returning from Ireland and turning the page on her stormy relationship with Edward, the brooding Irish photographer, she is determined to rebuild her life in Paris with help from her best friend, Felix. She focuses solely on getting her literary cafe back on track - until she meets Olivier. He is kind and thoughtful, and she may have a future with him...until she stumbles across her former love at a photography exhibit.

Laurel Hill and her precocious daughter, Skye, have always been each other's everything. The pair lives on Lake Superior, where the local school has classes of just four children and the nearest hospital is a helicopter ride away. Though they live frugally, eking out a living with Laurel's patchwork of jobs, their deep love for each other feels like it can warm them even on the coldest of nights. What more do they need? One otherwise normal afternoon, their landlord decides to evict them in favor of a more profitable summer rental, and they are pushed farther to the margins.

Rowan McNamara doesn't open the door to her new life—she's thrown through it. Following an argument with her abusive fiance, Rowan runs. With no family except for her estranged sister, Celia, Rowan takes refuge in an idyllic New England town. There, she meets Gabriel, the eleven-year-old son of her neighbor, Lee. Lee is welcoming, friendly, and a little too helpful. But Gabriel is a mystery: withdrawn, often bruised, and only willing to speak to Rowan through his basement window. When she discovers that Lee has kept Gabriel imprisoned for the past three years, Rowan is desperate to save him.

It’s been years since Dr. Imani Kemp has returned home to Peachtree Cove, Georgia. As Tallahassee’s most sought-after OB-GYN, she doesn’t have much time for anything else. But when her mom announces she’s marrying a man she just met on a dating app, Imani knows she has to put a stop to it immediately. Let her mom be hurt again after the disastrous way her last marriage ended? Absolutely not. Always her protector, Imani won’t rest until her mom sees reason. She just never expected sparks to fly with the groom’s son.

Jenna Abbott’s life went up in flames even before the fire started in Tenmile, Oregon. She was still coping with her husband's affair—and the revelation that he got a much younger woman pregnant—when the fire finally died down, and Ryan was among the missing. Chelsea Goddard still can’t explain how her estranged husband got back to Tenmile from out of the country the day of the fire, and she also can’t shake the nagging feeling that the secrets they’ve kept between them for the last twenty years might just be the tinder that made it all burn.

Growing up on a farm in early twentieth-century rural Iceland, Karitas Ólafsdóttir, one of six siblings, yearns for a new life. An artist, Karitas has a powerful calling and is determined to never let go of her true being, one unsuited for the conventional. But she is powerless against the fateful turns of real life and all its expectations of women. Pulled back time and again by design and by chance to the Icelandic countryside - as dutiful daughter, loving mother, and fisherman’s wife - she struggles to thrive, to be what she was meant to be.

After Kiran loses her mother, she escapes to the Welsh countryside—to allow herself to grieve away from turbulent city life in London, to leave her toxic family behind, and to find solace in the purity of the natural world. I Can Hear the Cuckoo is a tender, philosophical memoir about the beauty of a microscopic life, the value of solitariness, and respecting the rhythm and timing of the earth. This is a reflective book about finding friendship in the most unexpected places—and what nature and a small community in the Welsh Valleys can teach us about life.

Devastated by the sudden death of her mother—a quiet, loving and intensely private Southern seamstress called Miss Mabel, who overflowed with pearls of Ozarks wisdom but never spoke of her own family—Sutton Douglas makes the impulsive decision to pack up and head north to the Michigan resort town where she believes she’ll find answers to the lifelong questions she’s had about not only her mother’s past but also her own place in the world.

What will be will be. Belinda Marshall’s idyllic teenage life in Brittany, France, fell apart when her parents dramatically separated and her mother took her back to England. Fast forward 35 years when Belinda’s world is once again turned upside down. It’s the week before Christmas and her employer 'surprises’ Belinda by asking for her help to rejuvenate their latest investment, a run-down campsite in Brittany.

Sadie Wingate has been keeping secrets... from her family and from her brand-new husband. Once the truth is revealed, her whole world melts like a truffle in the sunshine. Can Sadie finally settle for a sweet life on Amelia Island… or will stability send her searching for the next adventure? Raina nears her delivery date and signs the papers ending her marriage, but there’s one thing missing in her life. Despite being the fixer in her family, the only solution to her heart’s dilemma seems all wrong for this newly divorced mother of infant twins. But how can she say no?

One summer evening, Lib Hanson is confronted by her painful past when Matt Marlow, the forty-year-old son she abandoned as an infant, shows up on her porch. Fiercely independent, Lib has never revealed her son's existence—or her previous marriage—to her husband, Jack. Married nearly three decades but living in separate houses (to the confusion but acceptance of their neighbors), they enjoy an ease and comfort together in small-town Anthem, Wisconsin. But Jack is a stickler for honesty, and Lib's long-dormant secret threatens to unravel their lives.

Maggie Bailey has not had an easy childhood. Her father, Michael, always too easy with his fists after spending the family’s rent money down the pub. Just sixteen, in love and blinded by promises, Maggie sees marriage to handsome Jack as her great escape. However, she soon finds herself abandoned with a beautiful baby when Jack disappears. Maggie is forced to seek a new life away from the East End of London and finds herself a job at a hotel in Yarmouth.

Clara Seymour is trying to find her feet in London, living away from home for the first time. Brought up by her domineering mother, treasuring time any time with her adoring father, Clara's world is brought to a standstill when her dad abruptly dies. Then, a mystery comes to light in a letter from him. I am sure you are aware that before I met your mother I had a previous marriage. But what we never discussed is that we had a daughter. So begins a journey of discovery that takes Clara to remote Norway and a landscape as brutal as it is bewitching.

In small towns between the North Carolina Piedmont and the coast, the best scenery is often in the sky. On flat sweeps of red clay and scrub pine, the days move monotonously, safely, but above, in the blink of an eye, dangerous clouds can boil out of all four corners of the sky. The flat slow land starts to shiver and anything can happen. In such a storm, on Annie Peregrine’s seventh birthday, her father gave her the airplane and minutes later drove out of her life.

In the peaceful Wiltshire valley of Essington St Mary, architect Corin Drayton stumbles upon a ghastly new building development that is set to destroy the tranquil atmosphere and Edwardian features of this quiet neighbourhood. He is horrified. For only recently has he inherited - and spent his life savings on renovating - a home for himself and his newly pregnant wife Lucia in Larch Tree Lane. From the cottages and farms to the local shop, pub and old manor house, residents' lives are set to intertwine, relationships bloom, and both romance and heartache lie ahead.