Rural Small Town Fiction

Martha Wallace came to Dublin from her home in America to find her birth mother. But instead she has lost her heart to the impossibly charming JP Deverill. Bridie Doyle, now mistress of Castle Deverill, is determined to make the castle she used to work in her home. But her flamboyant husband, Cesare, has other ideas. Kitty Deverill has come to terms with her life with her husband, Robert. But then Jack O'Leary, the love of her life, returns to Ballinakelly....

È una fredda sera di un maggio che non cede il passo alla primavera quando il corpo senza vita di una giovane donna viene trovato in un bosco di Blavy. Per l’ispettrice Piera Jantet della questura di Aosta si tratta di un lampante caso di omicidio, ma le evidenze si fermano qua: nessun nome, nessuna traccia e, soprattutto, nessun movente. Il vicequestore Pezzolari però è stato chiaro: una settimana per arrivare in fondo alla faccenda, non un giorno in più! Fortuna che Piera Jantet non è certo tipo da lasciarsi scoraggiare da tempi stretti e ostacoli apparentemente insormontabili.

In small-town Tennessee, 18-year-old Charlie Ross wagers a kiss from Anna Cochran, the prettiest girl in town, and wins. But before their burgeoning romance can take flight, Charlie is drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. Anna promises she'll wait for him, no matter how long it takes. But when Charlie is taken prisoner, and later presumed dead, Anna is left to pick up the pieces to her shattered world. Eight years later, Charlie comes home. But his triumphant return is short-lived when he discovers the love of his life has moved on.

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.

Every summer the peaches ripen in Port Peter, and the tourists arrive to gorge themselves on fruit and sun. They don't see the bird women, who cavort on the cliffs and live in a meadow beneath the lake. But when summer ends and the visitors go back home, every pregnant Port Peter girl knows what she needs to do: deliver her child to the Birds in a laundry basket on those same lakeside cliffs. But the Birds don't want Georgia Jackson.

William Henry Devereaux, Jr., spiritually suited to playing left field but forced by a bad hamstring to try first base, is the unlikely chairman of the English department at West Central Pennsylvania University. Over the course of a single convoluted week, he threatens to execute a duck, has his nose slashed by a feminist poet, discovers that his secretary writes better fiction than he does, suspects his wife of having an affair with his dean, and finally confronts his philandering elderly father, the one-time king of American Literary Theory, at an abandoned amusement park.

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.

Four women, all from very different lives, all with reason to step into the water and wash away their past. But will the friendship they build be enough to keep them afloat when they each must face their fears?

Can coming home bring redemption? Or at least a measure of peace? Recently released from prison, Blake Alvares returns to the only place she ever felt safe, the now derelict Maine town in which she harbored as a teen. Determined to conceal her secrets and losses, she soon finds herself dragged into others’ lives when she takes a job on a boat owned by a notorious young lobsterman.

When her late grandfather’s dying deputy calls Mercy to his side, she and Elvis inherit the cold case that haunted him - and may have killed him. But finding Beth Kilgore 20 years after she disappeared is more than a lost cause. It’s a Pandora’s box releasing a rain of evil on the very people Mercy and Elvis hold most dear. With her grandmother Patience gone missing and Elvis’s future uncertain, Mercy faces the prospect of losing her most treasured allies, the only ones she believes truly love and understand her.

Adopted at 13, Dell Jordan was loved, mentored, and encouraged to pursue her passion for music. Now, at 20, after a year abroad with a traveling symphony, a scholarship to Julliard is within reach. But underneath Dell's smoothly polished surface lurk mysteries from the past. Why did her mother abandon her? Who was her father? Are there faces somewhere that look like hers - blood relatives she's never met? Determined to find answers, Dell sets off on a secret journey into Oklahoma's Kiamichi Mountains, drawn by the only remaining link to her origins.

A touching modern fairytale that won't let go of your heart. Gamekeeper Carol Lund knows she's not special enough to attract an alpha male like Mathias, so his offer to help her adopt a herd for her lonely giraffe is surprising - and his determined seduction even more so. But just as she finally welcomes him into her bed, his careless actions crush her heart. Will she give him a second chance to prove she'll always come first in his heart?

In a sleepy rural town in South Carolina, Dylan and Maggie Styles are a young couple in love, preparing eagerly for the birth of their first son. But events take a tragic turn in the delivery room, and their child is delivered stillborn. When Maggie hemorrhages and slips into a coma, Dylan slips into what can only be described as a walking coma, holding vigil at his beloved wife’s bedside.

Sully Raines sets out to find his birth mother, and ends up in Blessings, Georgia. A new surprise awaits him here, but of the best kind - his childhood sweetheart, whom he hasn't seen since she moved away when they were teens, is living in Blessings now. He's not sure she's as happy to see him as he is to see her, but it's been a lot of years, and a lot of water under the bridge... Sully's heartfelt search for answers about his past might just turn out to be the key to his future.

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.

Tess and Simon Sparrow may have a few more grey hairs than they used to, but that doesn’t stop them from being swept up in a whirlwind romance and starting over. Swapping their city lives for an escape to the Cornish countryside, they fall in love with a crumbling hotel and impulsively buy it to renovate as their forever home. But soon the newlyweds have had their first fight (and their second and third...) and building costs are spiralling out of control. Their families think they’re mad and Tess is starting to agree – she just wants to escape back to civilisation.

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.

Dani Capelli has never truly belonged anywhere. And from her earliest days as a foster child in Queens, she would have been lost if it weren’t for her love of animals. Until high school, when she fell hard for the wrong boy, and found herself pregnant - and married - by graduation. Two daughters later, Dani realized her mistake and filed for divorce, and with the help of scholarships and loans - and a lot of macaroni and cheese dinners - she enrolled in vet school. Things were finally looking up, until her ex-husband became her late husband, in the most notorious way possible.

Cordelia McQueen is little more than a prisoner in her father’s house until he barters her off to a stranger in exchange for land and water rights. Now in a new place and married to a man as big and bold as untamed Texas, Cordelia prepares to live within her husband’s shadow and help him achieve his goals. Dallas has one driving ambition: to put West Texas on the map. Convinced he’s too harsh a man to be loved, he expects nothing except a son from his shy wife. But with each passing day, Dallas discovers a woman of immense hidden courage and fortitude.

After years apart, Mick and Megan O’Brien are finally ready to make it official...again. Most of their grown children couldn’t be happier about their rekindled love and impending marriage this holiday season. Only Connor is a holdout. Driven to become a divorce attorney after what he views as his mother’s abandonment of their family, Connor’s not about to give his blessing to this reunion romance. The last thing Megan wants to do is hurt her family again. After all, is she really sure she and Mick can make it this time around?