Rural Town Fiction

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?

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.

Ivy Marin’s life implodes after discovering her late husband spent their life savings on a beach house. Strapped for cash as an art teacher and with nowhere to go, Ivy and her recently jilted sister head to Summer Beach to recreate their lives. If only renovating a historical home didn’t unveil a host of hidden secrets in the beachside community—and her former high school crush wasn’t in charge of the small town.

Nashquitten, MA, is a decaying coastal enclave that not even tourist season can revive, full of locals who have run the town’s industries for generations. When a young woman dies at a house party, the circumstances around her death suspiciously unclear, the tight-knit community is shaken. As a mother grieves her daughter, a teacher her student, a best friend her confidante, the events around the tragedy become a lightning rod: blame is cast, secrets are buried deeper.

It was supposed to be an innocent night, celebrating my brother’s birthday. Nothing was supposed to go wrong. We’d vowed to be on our best behavior after all.... But it only took one rowdy night with my brothers to flip my world upside down. One unlucky encounter saddled us with a family curse and the promise of doomed relationships. I laughed it off immediately. “Yeah, right,” I thought. “A love curse. Ha!” Boy, was I wrong.

Long before Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly became a fixture in the colourful Irish village of Ballybucklebo, he was a young M.B. with plans to marry midwife Dierdre Mawhinney. Those plans were complicated by the outbreak of World War II and the call of duty. Assigned to the HMS Warspite, a formidable 30,000-ton battleship, Surgeon Lieutenant O'Reilly soon found himself face-to-face with the hardships of war, tending to the dreadnought's crew of 1,200 as well as to the many casualties brought aboard.

McKenzie Shaw would do anything for her hometown of Haven Point. It may be small, but it’s never let her down…unlike gorgeous, infuriating Ben Kilpatrick. He was her childhood hero until he closed his family’s factory, leaving the town’s economy in shambles. Now his tech firm is considering opening a local facility. For Haven Point’s sake, McKenzie has to grit her teeth and play nice.

While Barney loves his life at Bumblebee Barn - a farm that has been in his family for generations - he's struggling to find someone to share it with. The early mornings quad biking through muddy fields and the long hours looking after the crops and animals are proving to be a deterrent to finding love. So when his sister, Fizz - desperate for Barney to find his soulmate - sees an advert for Love on the Farm, a new reality TV show to help farmers find love, he has nothing to lose by applying.

Born in a bathtub in 1954 to a white mother and a Cherokee father, Betty Carpenter is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit in the rural town of Breathed, Ohio, is one of poverty and violence—both from outside the family and, devastatingly, from within. But despite the hardships she faces, Betty is resilient. Her curiosity about the natural world, her fierce love for her sisters, and her father’s brilliant stories are kindling for the fire of her own imagination, and in the face of all to which she bears witness, Betty discovers an escape: she begins to write.

Let’s start here. The twelve days of Christmas are actually after the holiday. And my dad, being the great guy he is, and the battalion chief of the fire department, signs up one of his rebellious firefighters for a retreat because of his bad behavior. The guy is a total grouch. But when he misses the bus for the adult redemption camp, Dad sticks the guy with me for twelve days. Alone.

“From exactly midnight until daybreak, the Namiya General Store advice box will be reopening for one night only.” When three delinquents hole up in an abandoned general store after their most recent robbery, to their great surprise, a letter drops through the mail slot in the store’s shutter. This seemingly simple request for advice sets the trio on a journey of discovery as, over the course of a single night, they step into the role of the kindhearted former shopkeeper who devoted his waning years to offering thoughtful counsel to his correspondents.

After 30 years, Wilson Lewis is forced to face a painful truth: the romance has gone out of his marriage. His wife, Jane, has fallen out of love with him, and it is entirely his fault. Despite the shining example of his in-laws, Noah and Allie Calhoun, and their 50-year love affair, Wilson himself is a man unable to express his true feelings. He has spent too little time at home and too much at the office, leaving the responsibility of raising their children to Jane. Now his daughter is about to marry, and his wife is thinking about leaving him.

Two brothers meet at the remote fence line separating their cattle ranches in the lonely outback. In an isolated belt of Western Australia, they are each other’s nearest neighbor, their homes a four-hour drive apart. The third brother lies dead at their feet. Something caused Cam, the middle child who had been in charge of the family homestead, to die alone in the middle of nowhere. So the eldest brother returns with his younger sibling to the family property and those left behind. But the fragile balance of the ranch is threatened.

In a quest for a simpler life, Helen and Nate have abandoned the comforts of suburbia to take up residence on 44 acres of rural land where they will begin the ultimate, aspirational do-it-yourself project: building the house of their dreams. When they discover that this beautiful property has a dark and violent past, Helen, a former history teacher, becomes consumed by the local legend of Hattie Breckenridge, a woman who lived and died there a century ago.

Natalie Kaleta will do anything for the artists at her gallery, including risk life, limb, and the effect of humidity on her naturally curly hair. Braving a downpour to check on reclusive Ronan Mitchell, Natalie gets stranded by a mudslide at his mountain home, where the brooding glass artist reveals his playful side, sending her inconvenient crush from under-the-radar to over-the-top. After a secret tore apart his family and made him question his sense of self, Ronan fled his hometown for Happily Inc, but the sunny small town can’t fix his damaged heart.

The town of Marshall, Texas, is the epicenter of intellectual property law in the US—renowned for its speedy trials and massive payouts. One of its best lawyers is James Euchre. His newest client, Amir Zawar, is a CEO forced to defend his life’s work against a patent infringement claim. But when a beloved hometown hero is murdered, all signs point to Zawar, an outsider with no alibi. With the help of a former federal prosecutor and a local PI, Euchre hopes to uncover the truth. In his first criminal case, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Jan Karon's millions of fans can't wait to sit down with her heartwarming and hilarious characters, who have a way of becoming family. In fact, readers and booksellers across the country kept Out to Canaan and At Home in Mitford on The New York Times bestseller list for months. In A New Song, Mitford's longtime Episcopal priest, Father Tim, retires. However, new challenges and adventures await when he agrees to serve as interim minister of a small church on Whitecap Island.

Twenty miles across the North Dakota border, where the scenery goes from rolling grass prairie to pipeline fields, detective Cassie Dewell has been assigned as the new deputy sheriff of Grimstad - a place people used to be from but were never headed to. Grimstad is now the oil capital of North Dakota. With oil comes money, with money comes drugs, and with drugs come the dirtiest criminals hustling to corner the market.

From USA Today bestselling author Dakota Davies comes an all new small town suspense romance about a broken military hero and the soft-hearted girl he’ll burn the world down to save.

When life throws her one setback too many, midwife and young widow Tess Hartsong takes off for Runaway Mountain. In this small town high in the Tennessee mountains, surrounded by nature, she hopes to outrun her heartbreak and find the solace she needs to heal. But instead of peace and quiet, she encounters an enigmatic artist with a craving for solitude, a fairy-tale sprite with too many secrets, a helpless infant, a passel of curious teens, and a town suspicious of outsiders, especially one as headstrong as Tess.