Rural Town Fiction

Faced with the harsh reality that there are 25,000 more women than men in London, Katie’s dating prospects are at an all-time low. While she’s glad it’s not a man’s world anymore, it wouldn’t hurt if there were more eligible bachelors. More likely to get murdered than married, according to gleeful media reports, Katie resigns herself to the fact that there’s no sex in the city for her and decides to head for the hills - or the Scottish Highlands to be exact.

With Holding Lies, John Larison takes us deep into a thriving subculture of the Northwest, one born of the ferns and firs, rain and hot-springs, firebombs and whitewater. He takes us even deeper into the troubles of Hank Hazelton, a 59-year-old river guide, as he struggles to reconnect with his only daughter after a 14-year estrangement. His failure as a father haunts him, along with other deep regrets, tragedies, and longings. In the days before his daughter's arrival, Hank discovers a drift boat stranded below a rapid, empty except for a long smear of blood on its seat.

After the end of a long-term relationship, local weather girl Bea Armstrong has been avoiding her family, and their inevitable 'I-told-you-sos'. But with Christmas fast approaching, she is finally on her way home to Charis House, the school in Sherwood Forest that her mum and dad run in their old family home. And to top it all off, the insufferable Henry Fairfax—who her parents have always wanted her to marry—has also been invited.

The population of Falls Creek, North Carolina, is a collective menace to society. Layla thought the first line of her orientation packet was a joke, but she soon realized it was all facts. After only a few hours on the job, the whip-smart flight nurse found herself flying headfirst into small-town drama.

Hotshot attorney Reuben Graham has finally agreed to take a vacation, when his plane suddenly plunges into the Alaskan wilderness. Just his luck. But his frustrations have only begun as he finds himself stranded with the injured, and superhot, pilot, a man who’s endearingly sociable - and much too young for Reuben to be wanting him this badly.

Back in the summer of 1988, a young Richard Chizmar was catapulted into the center of a living nightmare as the serial killer Joshua Gallagher—dubbed by the media as “The Boogeyman”—stalked his tranquil Maryland town. A lot has changed in the intervening years. These days, Chizmar enjoys a certain level of celebrity and notoriety himself, being the only person that an incarcerated Josh Gallagher will speak to on or off the record.

I came to Copper Falls expecting to settle my sister's estate and learn about the woman I never knew existed until I was notified of her death. Little did I know that stories about her weren't the only thing that awaited me in the small town.

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.

Bud Threadgoode grew up in the bustling little railroad town of Whistle Stop with his mother, Ruth, church-going and proper, and his Aunt Idgie, the fun-loving hell-raiser. Together they ran the town's popular Whistle Stop Cafe, known far and wide for its fun and famous fried green tomatoes. And as Bud often said of his childhood to his daughter, Ruthie, "How lucky can you get?"

After the death of her mother, Rebecca is sorting through her empty flat. Starting with the letters piling up on the doormat, she finds an envelope postmarked from Cornwall. In it is a letter that will change her life forever. A desperate plea from her mother’s elderly cousin, Olivia, to help save her beloved home. Rebecca arrives at Chynalls to find the house crumbling into the ground and Olivia stuck in hospital with no hope of being discharged until her home is made habitable.

One look at his warm brown eyes and Kate Jackson knows she’s found her husband. It’s been 20 years since Daniel went missing in a refinery explosion and was finally declared dead, but Kate never gave up hope, convinced he was somewhere out there, suffering from amnesia. Then, on a trip to Buckhorn, Montana, she sees him - working as a carpenter, scarred, but still her Danny. Yet Jon Harper, as he calls himself, insists he’s a stranger.

Shari has discovered that being a single mom is one of the hardest things she has ever done. With her job, strained relationship with Tag, and trying to keep her household from falling apart, she barely has time for herself, much less dating. One night, and out of an act of sheer stupidity, she allows Fiona, the new, young move-in, to convince her to go to a club across the bridge.

Marshall is still trying to put the pieces together after the death of her husband. After she is involved in a terrible accident, her editor sends her to the small, backwards town of Raeford to investigate a clearly ridiculous rumor: that a horse has given birth to a healthy, human baby boy. When Marshall arrives in Raeford, she finds an insular town that is kinder to the horses they are famous for breeding than to their own people. But when two horribly mangled bodies are discovered in a field—one a horse, one a human—she realizes that there might be a real story here.

A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit Jesuit into crisis. A boy’s mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he unleashes once a year in reckless duels with the Fate, God, or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman on a run in Seattle experiences a shooting star moment that pierces her with a love that will eventually help heal the Jesuit, the angry young man, and innumerable others.

Eleven unforgettable new stories demonstrate the emotional power and the clean, assured style that have earned Meloy praise from critics and devotion from readers and listeners. Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, this collection is about the battlefields—and fields of victory—that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars.

Set in the wide-open spaces of the American West, The Power of the Dog is a stunning story of domestic tyranny, brutal masculinity, and thrilling defiance from one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in American literature. The novel tells the story of two brothers—one magnetic but cruel, the other gentle and quiet—and of the mother and son whose arrival on the brothers’ ranch shatters an already tenuous peace.

Everything has led up to this moment in Lizzie Glick's life. All of her curiosity, concern, and dreams have pointed to this time when she must make some very big decisions. Will she join the Church? Will she continue teaching? Will she marry Stephen? Questions and indecision as well as answers and certainty enter Lizzie's life in Big Decisions, the third and final novel in this series written by an Amish author and based on true-life experiences.

When Jenny inherits her estranged grandmother’s cottage in Sherwood Forest, she has nothing to lose - no money, no job, no friends, no family to speak of, and zero self-respect. Things can only get better.... Her grumpy but decidedly handsome new neighbour, Mack, has a habit of bestowing unsolicited good deeds on her. And when Jenny is welcomed into a rather unusual book club, life seems to finally be getting more interesting. Instead of reading, the members pledge to complete individual challenges before Christmas.

Peyton Cabot's 15th year will be a painful and transformative one. His father, the heroic but reluctant head of a moneyed Savannah family, has come home from WWII a troubled vet, drowning his demons in bourbon and distancing himself from his son. A tragic accident shows Peyton the depths of his parents' devotion to each other but interrupts his own budding romance with the girl of his dreams, Lisa Wallace. Struggling to cope with a young life upended, Peyton makes a daring decision: He will retrace a journey his father took at 15, riding his bicycle all the way to Key West, Florida.

A historic western that opens in 1873, a time when recession is forcing thousands westwards to recoup their fortunes. The West is tough, brutal and the Indian is the enemy. But when a white woman is raped, it is a half-breed Cheyenne who comes to the rescue. From the author of Jake and Upland Passage.