Rural Town Fiction

Blue Bishop has a knack for finding lost things. While growing up in charming small-town Buttonwood, Alabama, she’s happened across lost wallets, jewelry, pets, her wandering neighbor, and sometimes, trouble. No one is more surprised than Blue, however, when she comes across an abandoned newborn baby in the woods, just south of a very special buttonwood tree. Sarah Grace Landreneau Fulton is at a crossroads. She has always tried so hard to do the right thing, but her own mother would disown her if she ever learned half of Sarah Grace’s secrets.

Hildy Good is a townie. A lifelong resident of a small community on the rocky coast of Boston's North Shore, she knows pretty much everything about everyone. And she's good at lots of things, too. A successful real-estate broker, mother, and grandmother, her days are full. But her nights have become lonely ever since her daughters, convinced their mother was drinking too much, sent her off to rehab. Now she's in recovery—more or less.

It's not like I planned to fall for my older brother's best friend. It just happened. With a perfect body covered in tattoos, and a dirty mouth, Roman is the kind of guy women notice—and believe me, I noticed. Even when I tried not to. When he finally gives in to temptation, there's no going back. At least for me. Too bad Roman doesn't see it that way. He thinks he needs to protect me and my relationship with my brother, but I don't need him to fight my battles. I just need him.

Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it's an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret "assignments," to bring the rain everybody is praying for.

Some places are too good to be true. Under a pink moon, there is a perfect little town not found on any map. In that town, there are quiet streets lined with pretty houses, houses that conceal the strangest things. After a couple years of hard traveling, ex-cop Mona Bright inherits her long-dead mother's home in Wink, New Mexico. And the closer Mona gets to her mother's past, the more she understands that the people of Wink are very, very different....

Kit Jernigan despairs of ever fitting in with her new tight-knit K9 unit - they've been through too much to welcome a stranger. So when a killer strikes, it's a fight to convince her fellow officers to trust her long enough to catch the woman she knows is responsible. She can't do it on her own. What she needs most is a partner: local fire spotter Wesley March.

Raising a family was always Adam Mills’ dream, although solo parenting and moving back to tiny Garnet Run certainly were not. After a messy breakup, Adam is doing his best to give his young daughter the life she deserves - including accepting help from their new reclusive neighbor to fulfill her Christmas wish. Though the little house may not have “the most lights ever”, the Mills home begins to brighten as handsome Wes Mobray spends more time there and slowly sheds his protective layers. But when the eye-catching house ends up in the news, Wes has to make a choice.

I was in the wrong place at the wrong time—and that moment changed me forever. After walking in on a masked man murdering my neighbor, I went back to the one place I swore I'd never step foot in again. Citrus Cove. The sleepy town hasn't changed much, but the people have. Including my old high school bully, Cameron Harlow. He's the last person I want to see. He should be the last person I want.

Army veteran Cameron Pope arrives back in Jubilee, Kentucky, for the first time in years. He barely has time to catch his breath when he becomes embroiled in a race of life or death for his little niece and a deadly hunt for the human traffickers who are destroying the peace of his mountain town. When he's reunited with Rusty Caldwell—a woman from his past he's never stopped thinking about—he wants to believe they can finally be together.

Flann O'Brien's most popular and surrealistic novel concerns an imaginary, hellish village police force and a local murder.

Weird, satirical, and very funny, its popularity has suddenly increased with the mention of the novel in the TV series Lost.

Once, Alexis Brand and Culhane Travis were partners, both on and off the job. Now the former deputy turned bounty hunter is on her former lover's trail after he's charged with killing the ex-wife Alexis didn't even know he had. Burying the feelings that still tie her to him, Alexis tracks down Culhane easily enough. But deadly trouble has followed him to this small Montana town, forcing them to flee from the law together and Alexis to guard secrets she hoped she'd never have to reveal.

After breaking free from the gilded cage of my abusive marriage, I have nothing to my name but a letter from a long-lost relative. Come home, Willow. Your family is waiting for you. I sacrificed everything to flee for the tiny town of Briar Valley and its promise of a better life for my young daughter. Hope often takes the unlikeliest of forms, but I didn't expect to find it nestled among the rugged, snow-capped mountains. Nor did I intend to surrender my heart to three tortured mountain men hiding from their own grief in the thick forest of pine trees.

There are three things you should know about Elsie. The first is that she's my best friend. The second is that she always knows what to say to make me feel better. And the third...might take a little bit more explaining. Eighty-four-year-old Florence has fallen in her flat. As she waits to be rescued, Florence wonders if a terrible secret from her past is about to come to light; and, if the charming new resident is who he claims to be, why does he look exactly like a man who died 60 years ago?

Cecil Younger is a man who takes comfort in the absurdity of the universe, and the universe is obliging him when he gets a call from his lawyer and psychiatrist, who offers him a job. A client wants to hire Younger to kill someone. Though common sense tells him murder just isn't a good career move, his finances tell him it can't hurt to meet his potential client, hoping he can succeed in appeasing him - without a dead body.

Fairacre is a village of cottages, a church and the school - and, at the heart of the school, its head mistress Miss Read. Through her discerning eye, we meet the villagers of Fairacre and see their trials and tribulations, from the irascible school cleaner Mrs Pringle, to the young school children, with their scraped knees, hopeful faces and inevitable mischief.

A Penguin Classic. First published in 1938, this volume of stories collected with the encouragement of his longtime editor Pascal Covici serves as a wonderful introduction to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Set in the beautiful Salinas Valley of California, where simple people farm the land and struggle to find a place for themselves in the world, these stories reflect Steinbeck’s characteristic interests: The tensions between town and country, laborers and owners, past and present.

Single mom Heather Donovan’s dreams of home and family are tantalizingly within reach when she settles in Chesapeake Shores. The welcoming arms of the boisterous, loving O’Brien clan embrace her and her son. But accepting their support seems to further alienate her son’s father, Connor O’Brien. His parents’ divorce and his career as a high-powered divorce attorney have left him jaded about marriage. Then everything changes. Will the possibility of a future without Heather make Connor look at love and his career differently?

Isabel hates Christmas. She’s got a Christmas disaster for each of her 25 years. When her boss sends her from the sun-kissed beaches of Australia to snowy small-town Wyoming, it’s just another thing to add to her "do not like" list. Snow sucks. Christmas sucks. And cowboys suck most of all. Except, maybe, for one.

In 1916, Sven Ormson leaves a restless life in Stockholm to seek adventure in Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago where darkness reigns four months of the year and he might witness the splendor of the Northern Lights one night and be attacked by a polar bear the next. But his time as a miner ends when an avalanche nearly kills him, leaving him disfigured, and Sven flees even further, to an uninhabited fjord. There, with the company of a loyal dog, he builds a hut and lives alone, testing himself against the elements.

Glass artist Lucy Marinn has just had her heart shattered. She had envisioned a beautiful future in Friday Harbor with her fiancé Kevin. But not only has Kevin dumped her—he’s left her for her sister. Despite his betrayal, Lucy largely blames herself—apparently this was just another wrong move in a series of bad romantic choices. Kevin may not want to marry Lucy, but he still cares for her. He convinces his friend Sam Nolan, who owns a vineyard on San Juan Island, to date Lucy and help her recover from her bitterness.