Rural Town Fiction

All her life, Epiphany Salerno has been tossed like a dandelion seed on the wind. Now, at 16, she must move to the low-rent side of Blue Sky Hill and work where she's not wanted: in an upscale home on The Hill. J. Norman Alvord's daughter has hired a teenager to stay with him in the afternoons. Widowed and suffering from heart trouble, Norman wants to be left alone. But in Epie's presence, Norman discovers a mystery. Deep in his mind lie memories of another house, another life, and a woman who saved him.

FBI Agent Dillon Savich is on a challenging case involving the kidnapping of two teenage boys when trouble boils up in his personal life. His younger sister Lily has crashed her Explorer into a redwood in California's Hemlock Bay. Is it another suicide attempt, the second since the loss of her young daughter some seven months before? Savich and Sherlock discover that four of Lily's paintings, left to her by their very famous grandmother, artist Sarah Elliot, now worth millions, are at the heart of an intricate conspiracy.

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.

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.

Three generations of Schmidts have run their family’s beachfront restaurant and Jack has been at the helm since the death of his father. Jack puts the demands of the restaurant above all else, with a string of failed relationships, no hobbies, and no days off as proof of his commitment to the place. He can’t remember the last time he sat on the beach, or even enjoyed a moment to himself. Meanwhile, the DelDine group has been gradually snapping up beloved eateries along this stretch of coast and are pursuing Jack with a very generous offer to take Schmidt’s off his hands.

Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she has been writing for six years. At 31, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life.

"This is real." Three small words on a film canister found by graduate students Justin and Veronica, who discover a long-lost silent movie from more than a century ago. The startlingly realistic footage shows a young girl transforming into a winged being. Looking for proof behind this claim, they travel to the rural foothills of Tennessee to find Sadieville, where it had been filmed.

Dating Matthew O’Brien - a playboy and younger man - cost Laila Riley her career and her parents’ respect: a high price, even for love. So when Laila decides it was just a fling, she breaks it off, despite Matthew’s objections. But the O’Brien family has other ideas, and they conspire to get Laila to join them on a Dublin holiday. It’s a great time to get away from it all, but Laila has reservations about the trip. Matthew’s bound to be there, and she’s far from immune.

After ten years of loyal service, Daisy Butterworth has been made redundant. Like any clever woman, she knows the cure to redundancy is a little too much wine and her best friend. Only the next morning, Daisy has more than a hangover...she has a whole new house—in France! Seeing this as an opportunity instead of a disaster, she’s excited about finally moving to France, just as she and her husband always dreamed of. However, Daisy is in for another surprise. Despite planning to move there for over 20 years, her husband never actually intended to go.

Sloane Parker lives a small, contained life as a librarian in her small, contained town. She never thinks of herself as lonely...but still she looks forward to that time every day when old curmudgeon Arthur McLachlan comes to browse the shelves and cheerfully insult her. Their sparring is such a highlight of Sloane's day that when Arthur doesn't show up one morning, she's instantly concerned. And then another day passes, and another.

The summer of 1937 will be a turning point for 14-year-old Houston “Huck” Finn. When he and a friend find a dead body in a local creek, a rare Lindbergh flight watch on its wrist, it seems like a sign. Huck is building his own airplane, a fact he has concealed from his mother. That summer also marks the arrival of his cousin Annelise, sent to live with the family under mysterious circumstances. As it turns out, she has had flying lessons - another sign.

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.

Quatre femmes, quatre époques, quatre destins tragiques. Katia Gagnon nous surprend avec un roman sombre, aux tonalités fantastiques et au suspense haletant. Il y a d’abord Thérèse, dans les années 1990, qui soudain voit surgir de son passé un être qui viendra l’aider à se libérer enfin d’un fardeau qu’elle porte depuis des années. Il y a Michèle qui, à la faveur de la révolution sexuelle des années 1970, veut réinventer la vie, le couple, et oublier la mort que quelqu’un a déposée au plus profond de son être quand elle était toute petite.

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.

When 18-year-old Tam Lambert learns that her family’s upscale home is in foreclosure, the life she's known is forever changed. Tam and her family must move into a tiny house in a changing Dallas neighborhood called Blue Sky Hill.... New resident Shasta Reid-Williams knows nothing of real estate schemes when she and her husband purchase a home in Blue Sky Hill. To her, it’s the perfect place to raise her children. Better yet is getting to know Tam, who lives right across the street.

Sisters Jessica and Rachel Clayton once only had each other to rely on, but years of pain have carved a wide chasm between them. But seeing Rachel's family struggles reaching a breaking point, Jessica—whose career has made her an expert in downsizing and cutting the nonessential out of life—must learn how to let family and love back in, starting with her still-beloved, if reluctant, sibling.

The small, rundown village of Great Diddling is full of stories—author Berit Gardner can feel it. The way the villagers avoid outsiders, the furtive stares and whispers in the presence of newcomers… Berit can sense the edge of a story waiting to be unraveled, and she's just the person to do it. In fact, with a book deadline looming over her and no manuscript (not even the idea for a manuscript, truth be told), Berit doesn't just want this story. She needs it. Then, while attending a village tea party, Berit becomes part of the action herself.

This time, Sheriff Joanna Brady may expect to see her maternity leave through to completion, but the world has other plans when a serial homicide case surfaces in her beloved Cochise County. Rather than staying home with her newborn and losing herself in the cold cases to be found in her father’s long-unread diaries, Joanna instead finds herself overseeing a complex investigation involving multiple jurisdictions.

When a body turned up at her last catering gig it certainly put people off the hors d’oeuvres. With a reputation to salvage, Jodie’s determined that her next job for the village’s festival will go off without a hitch. But when chaos breaks out, Jodie Parker somehow always finds herself caught up in the picture. The body of a writer from the festival is discovered at the bottom of a cliff, and the prime suspect turns out to be the guest of honour, the esteemed painter Duncan Stovall.

Encabanée met en scène, Anouk qui a quitté son appartement confortable de Montréal pour un refuge forestier délabré au Kamouraska. Encabanée loin de tout dans le plus rude des hivers, elle livre son récit sous la forme d’un carnet de bord semé d’illustrations. Cherchant à apprivoiser son mode de vie frugal et à chasser sa peur, elle couche sur papier la métamorphose qui s’opère en elle.