Rural Small Town Fiction

Stepping off the Greyhound bus, I look at the town glinting in the distance beyond a crystal-clear mountain lake. The lines I’ve memorized from the ad are on repeat in my mind: accommodation and employment provided to women willing to relocate to a historic town with a shortage of women. When Virginia first sees the ad, her breath catches. Female? Check. Small-town seclusion needed? Check. Currently without a home or a job? Check and check. She dabs an extra layer of concealer over the bruise on her cheek, bundles up her belongings, and her secrets, and escapes her life in Savannah.

Every so often a love story so captures our hearts that it becomes more than a story - it becomes an experience to remember forever. The Notebook is such a book. It is a celebration of how passion can be ageless and timeless, a tale that moves us to laughter and tears and makes us believe in true love all over again.... At 31, Noah Calhoun, back in coastal North Carolina after World War II, is haunted by images of the girl he lost more than a decade earlier.

Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabo's books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution to which she soon finds herself consigned.

David Cobb is not a typical lawyer--he's more interested in dispensing God's wisdom than pertinent legal advice. High-stakes litigation is way outside his comfort zone. For many years, Zeke Caldwell has been concocting home remedies made from natural ingredients found in the coastal marshes near Wilmington, North Carolina. One of his remedies proved so effective that he patented it with the help of David's father. Now he suspects a big drug company has stolen his formula. What he doesn't know is that the theft has deeper, more evil roots.

When Maggie Banks arrives to run her best friend's struggling bookstore, she expects to sell bestsellers to the small-town clientele. But with the town on the map as a top literary destination and the tourist society bent on keeping businesses historic, Maggie is banned from selling anything written this century. So, when a series of mishaps suddenly tip the bookstore toward ruin, Maggie will have to get creative to keep the shop afloat. And in Maggie's world, bookish rules are made to be broken.

Bailey Cooper has always given more of himself to the two ranches he works on than his personal life, but one thing he knows for sure: Lettie is the girl he's going to marry. When she leaves without a goodbye the day after her eighteenth birthday, he's convinced he'll never see her again. That is, until she's falling off a ladder and into his arms.

Twenty-one-year-old Jenilee Lane's dreams are as narrow as the sky is wide. She doesn't imagine any good could come out of the tornado that has ripped across the Missouri farmland where she's made her home. But some inner spark compels her to take action. To rescue her elderly neighbor, Eudora Gibson, from the cellar in which she's been trapped. To make her way to the nearby town of Poetry, where the townspeople have begun to gather in the only building left standing. To collect from the devastated landscape fragments of life that lie strewn about in the tornado's wake.

Ty Greene promised me forever and like a fool—I believed him. But he skipped town with a bag of broken promises and a piece of my heart. It’s taken time, but I've put myself back together and moved on. Now Ty’s a big country music star in Nashville and I curse his name every time his song plays on the radio. I don’t have time to dwell on the past. I’m too busy living my best life. I have the job of my dreams, a dating app that never disappoints, and the best friends in the world. Hashtag thriving. Life is good.

It’s been 25 years since Gus and Monica left England to start a new life in Spain, building a vineyard and wine business from the ground up. However, when Gus suffers a stroke and their idyllic Mediterranean life is thrown into upheaval, it’s left to their three grown-up children in London to step in.... Sebastian is busy running his company with his wife, Anna, who’s never quite seen eye to eye with her mother-in-law. Katie, a successful solicitor in the City, is distracted by the problems with her long-term partner, Nic, and the secretive lives of their three daughters.

It takes one dance at a party for Erianne Mitchell to fall heart-first for dashing entrepreneur Ty Mosby. They have business and friends in common—and a searing attraction that seems far too good to last. But when a devastating mistake tears them apart, Erianne flees to Wyoming with a secret, one she hopes Ty never discovers. She did nothing wrong, and she’ll never ask Ty to forgive her. She'll support herself…and the baby growing inside her. How can she be with a man who doesn’t trust her?

My life was perfectly fine before I jumped into the ocean fully clothed. Great job, perfect apartment, good enough boyfriend. So why did I turn up soaking wet at the beach bar of a very rough around the edges, very hot single dad and insist he hire me?

In the darkness of an old asylum, a young man unscrews the lid from a bottle of sleeping pills. In the nearby village, two couples begin their day. Local doctor, Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage. Across the field, in a farmhouse impossible to heat, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore. He's been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy farm he bought, a place where he hoped to create a new version of himself.

Selina sees beauty everywhere, including in the fields of cabbages. She has a natural curiosity about farming and oversteps the woman's traditional role by having the audacity to ask the men questions. She soon marries Pervus DeJong, a farmer. Selina eagerly offers suggestions for operational improvements, but Pervus ignores her, preferring to use the unprofitable farming methods employed by his father.

After losing her job in New York, Amber Green isn’t looking forward to visiting her godmother in the sleepy village of Cranbridge. With its empty lanes and rundown shops, it’s hardly a place to mend her lonely heart. But when Amber discovers that Cranbridge Stores, owned by her godmother, Cathy, and son, Josh, is under threat of financial ruin, she realises that her skills as a window dresser might just be able to help save the struggling shop.

Rhett Rivers is a charming billionaire playboy, and I'm Scarlett Wright, a woman who doesn't back down from a fight. Our worlds clash, and the sparks between us are burning hot. Until one reckless weekend together changes everything. Suddenly I'm facing an unexpected pregnancy, and the man who swept me off my feet isn't so sure about fatherhood. When a rare disorder threatens our baby, something in Rhett shifts. He's not just a playboy anymore, he's the man who will stop at nothing to save us.

Adam Craig is fourteen when he meets Brid near an isolated Celtic stone in the wild Scottish Highlands—he is fascinated by her exotic, gypsy-like dress and strange attitudes. They become friends, and, in time, passionate lovers. She leads him, unsuspecting, into the sixth century, where she has mastered the ancient mysteries and dangerous magic of the Druids. In her obsession with Adam, Brid is seen as a traitor by her people, only escaping death by following Adam to Edinburgh, when he leaves home to study medicine.

Struggling in his role as a newly single father, former army medic Kevin O’Brien moves home to Chesapeake Shores. He wants a haven for himself and his toddler son, surrounded by the family he knows he can count on and a future that’s nothing like his past. But Kevin is suddenly facing a risk he hadn’t anticipated...in the form of Main Street bookseller Shanna Carlyle. Shanna immediately recognizes Kevin as a wounded soul - she’s had way too much experience with the type.

When Zoe's best friend shows her the box of dreams they put together as kids, she would never have foreseen herself dumping Mr. Perfectly Fine and quitting her draining job. But when she looks in that box and realizes her life isn't even close to where she envisioned she'd be when she was ten, she panics and implodes everything she knows.

Rich Manning and Jamie Warren have always been friends - and nothing but friends. However, that changes when she asks him to father the child she so desperately wants. Rich agrees - if she'll marry him. Because he thinks their Marriage of Inconvenience could become a real marriage instead.

Since the turn of the century, a generation has come of age knowing only war, recession, political gridlock, racial hostility, and a simmering fear of environmental calamity. In the country’s forgotten pockets, where industry long ago fled, where foreclosures, Walmarts, and opiates riddle the land, death rates for rural whites have skyrocketed, fueled by suicide, addiction, and a rampant sense of marginalization and disillusionment. This is the world the characters in Stephen Markley’s brilliant debut novel, Ohio, inherit. This is New Canaan.