Rural Life

For most of her eighty years, Mary Jackson has been waiting. As she’s endured the steady invasion of tourists, influencers and real estate developers who have discovered the lakeside charm of Good Hart, Michigan, she’s also patiently anticipated the arrival of a stranger she’s believed since childhood would one day carry on her legacy—the Very Cherry General Store. Like generations of Jackson women before her, Cherry Mary, as she’s known locally, runs the community hub.

The scent of flowers and change is in the air for the Wingate sisters. With her husband gone for weeks at a stretch, Rose's unwavering enthusiasm is tested, forcing her to remove her famous rose-colored glasses and face a family crisis. While Susannah plans an anniversary surprise for Rex, Chloe finds the courage to try one more career path, with help coming from the one constant in her life, her precious furbaby, Lady Bug.

Bonny Blankenship's most treasured memories are of idyllic summers spent in Watersend, South Carolina, with her best friend, Lainey McKay. Now in her early 50s, Bonny is desperate to clear her head after a tragic mistake threatens her career as an emergency room doctor, and her marriage crumbles around her. With her troubled teenage daughter, Piper, in tow, she goes back to the beloved river house, where she is soon joined by Lainey and her two young children.

Meet Linda Breland, single parent of two teenage daughters. The oldest, Lindsey, who always held her younger sister in check, is leaving for college. And Gracie, her Tasmanian devil, is giving her nightmares. Linda's personal life? Well, between the married men, the cold New Jersey winters, her pinched wallet and her ex-husband who marries a beautiful, successful woman ten years younger than she is - let's just say, Linda has seen enough to fill 1000 pages.

The Quality Street Factory is fizzing with the news that the King and Queen and the two young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, are going to visit the Mackintosh Factory where the country’s favourite wrapped chocolate is made. The factory floor is heady with excitement but plans are dealt a blow when a much loved staff member is the victim of a poisoning incident. Everyone is under suspicion, which only adds to Reenie Calder’s woes, anxious that her new promotion has only made her stick out even more like a sore thumb.

The lead homicide investigator in a rural town, Detective Sergeant Gemma Woodstock is deeply unnerved when a high school classmate is found strangled, her body floating in a lake. And not just any classmate, but Rosalind Ryan, whose beauty and inscrutability exerted a magnetic pull on Smithson High School, first during Rosalind's student years and then again when she returned to teach drama. As much as Rosalind's life was a mystery to Gemma when they were students together, her death presents even more of a puzzle.

It’s the summer of 1907, and the sun is scorching down on Mary Pearl in the Arizona Territory. Mary Pearl and her sister Esther take their minds off the heat by sneaking banned Jane Austen novels from Aunt Sarah Elliot’s lively bookshelf. Whispered read-alouds preoccupy their nights, and reveries of getting hitched to their own Mr. Darcy à la Pride and Prejudice swirl through their daydreams. In walks old-fashioned old-money suitor Aubrey Hanna, here to whisk 17-year-old Mary Pearl off her feet with a forbidden kiss and hasty engagement.

Zoë Colville spent years in a fancy hair salon with a long list of clients, living on cigarettes, croissants, and a shoestring. It was everything she'd ever wanted. But when an unexpected and overwhelming loss caused her life to shift unexpectedly, she found herself on a different path. One where the only use for a hairdryer is warming new-born lambs; where the cycle of life on a farm gives new meaning on purpose, and where nature is both a strict teacher and a balm to soothe the pressures of everyday life.

For young couple Taz and Marnie, their fixer-upper is the symbol of their new life together: a work in progress, the beginning of something grand, all the more so when they learn that a baby is on the way. But the blueprint for the perfect life eludes Taz when Marnie dies in childbirth, plummeting the taciturn carpenter headfirst into the new, strange world of fatherhood alone, a landscape of contradictions, of great joy and sorrow.

When Brid Harcus is sent to the Orkney Islands, in the far reaches of Scotland, she has high hopes for her trip being short, straightforward and lucrative. Her mother has inherited a cottage from her Great Aunt Jennet which has been unlived in and unloved for decades, and the time has come to make it habitable and saleable. Easy, right? But Midness Cottage has other ideas. For one thing it’s rather more ‘fixer upper’ than Country Living. And Brid definitely hadn’t planned for the strongly held local belief that the cottage is meant to be the home of the Orkney Witch.

It's 1984 - and it's an important time for the children of Ragley-on-the Forest school.... Their school choir is to sing a carol in a church in York, and it's actually going to be on television! Helping to keep his excited children - not to mention their parents - under control during these momentous events taxes Jack and his staff to the limit. And at the same time, Jack has his own problems to deal with....

Where does one go, you might ask, when the world falls apart? When the immutable facts of your life—the mundane, the trivial, the take-for-granted minutiae that once filled every second of every day—suddenly disappear? Where does one go in such dire and unexpected circumstances? I went home, of course.

July knows 18 things about her mother. But not the truth. Summer, 1995. On her tenth birthday, July's teacher sets the class a project to find out about a relation they don't know. It's easy for July to choose her subject. She doesn't remember her mother, who died when she was small, and her father refuses to talk about her. Ever. The only memories she has of her are flashbacks from the accident that claimed her mother's life. But then she receives the note: 'She didn't die in a car accident.'

Margot Hart travels to Ireland to write a biography of the famous Deverill family. She knows she must speak to the current Lord Deverill - JP - if she is to uncover the secrets of the past. A notorious recluse, JP won’t be an easy man to crack. But Margot is determined - and she is not a woman who is easily put off. What she never expected was to form a close bond with JP and be drawn into his family disputes. Shouldering the blame for running up debts that forced him to sell the family castle, JP is isolated and vulnerable.

Welcome to the quirky town of Cherico, Mississippi, where potluck meetings at the local library provide a feast for mind and stomach alike. . .If some folks had their way, the Cherico library would have shut down long ago. Councilman Durden Sparks aims to divert funding to a cause dear to his heart - and his wallet.

In this heartfelt sequel, Ruby McGavin returns to Cardinal, California, with her brother Nash, hoping the fresh start will help him kick a debilitating drinking habit. And Ruby’s not the only one with renewed hope, as saddlemaker Lucas McGavin redoubles his efforts to win her heart - even if Ruby is his brother’s widow. Soon, all three learn that building a better future means first making peace with the past.

Todd, the youngest of four children, has a developmental disability that keeps him at home on the farm with his mother and father. One special holiday season, Todd hears an ad on the radio from a shelter looking for temporary homes for their dogs during the holiday week. When Todd's parents at last give in to his pleas for this charitable cause, the family is faced with an entire shelter full of dogs needing homes.

In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations.

Jean Gilkyson is floundering in a trailer house in Iowa with yet another brutal boyfriend when she realizes this kind of life has got to stop, especially for the sake of her daughter, Griff. But the only place they can run to is Ishawooa, Wyoming, where Jean's loved ones are dead and her father-in-law, the only person who could take them in, wishes that she was, too.

Willy Cherrymill and his stepdaughter, Lacey, are deeply bruised by a past brimming with unanswered questions. It’s been 30 years since May DuBerry, Willy’s young wife and Lacey’s mother, abandoned them both, leaving Willy to raise Lacey alone. Lacey Cherrymill is smart, stubborn, and focused. She’s also single mother to a young daughter recently diagnosed with a devastating illness. The last thing she needs to think about right now is the betrayal that rocked her childhood. Reluctantly, she has returned to her rural beginnings, a former dairy farm in the Maryland countryside.