Book picks similar to
Back Trouble by Clare Chambers


fiction
adult-fiction
female-authors
england

Hurricane Season


Lauren K. Denton - 2018
    While Ty manages their herd of dairy cows, Betsy busies herself with the farm’s day-to-day operations and tries to forget her dream of motherhood. But when her free-spirited sister, Jenna, drops off her two young daughters for “just two weeks,” Betsy’s carefully constructed wall of self-protection begins to crumble.As the two weeks stretch deeper into the Alabama summer, Betsy and Ty learn to navigate the new additions in their world—and revel in the laughter that now fills their home. Meanwhile, record temperatures promise to usher in the most active hurricane season in decades.Attending an art retreat four hundred miles away, Jenna is fighting her own battles. She finally has time and energy to focus on her photography, a lifelong ambition. But she wonders how her rediscovered passion can fit in with the life she’s made back home as a single mom.When Hurricane Ingrid aims a steady eye at the Alabama coast, Jenna must make a decision that will change her family’s future, even as Betsy and Ty try to protect their beloved farm and their hearts. Hurricane Season is the story of one family’s unconventional journey to healing—and the relationships that must be mended along the way.“A story both powerful and enchanting: a don’t-miss novel in the greatest Southern traditions of storytelling.” —Patti Callahan Henry, New York Times bestselling author for The Hideaway

The Arrivals


Meg Mitchell Moore - 2011
     It's early summer when Ginny and William's peaceful life in Vermont comes to an abrupt halt. First, their daughter Lillian arrives, with her two children in tow, to escape her crumbling marriage. Next, their son Stephen and his pregnant wife Jane show up for a weekend visit, which extends indefinitely when Jane ends up on bed rest. When their youngest daughter Rachel appears, fleeing her difficult life in New York, Ginny and William find themselves consumed again by the chaos of parenthood -- only this time around, their children are facing adult problems. By summer's end, the family gains new ideas of loyalty and responsibility, exposing the challenges of surviving the modern family -- and the old adage, once a parent, always a parent, has never rung so true.

Valley of the Moon


Melanie Gideon - 2016
    It seems like a place from another time until she realizes it actually is. Lux must keep one foot in her world, raising her son as well as she can with the odds stacked against her, but every day she is more strongly drawn in by the sweet simplicity of life in Greengage, and by the irresistible connection she feels with a man born decades before her. Soon she finds herself torn between her ties to the modern world, her adored son and the first place she has ever felt truly at home.

Beautiful Lies


Lisa Unger - 2006
    She would still be the privileged daughter of a doting father and a loving mother. Her life would still be perfect — with only the tiny cracks of an angry junkie for a brother and a charming drunk with shady underworld connections for an uncle to mar the otherwise flawless whole. But that’s not what happened. Instead, those inconsequential decisions lead her to perform a good deed that puts her in the right place at the right time to unleash a chain of events that brings a mysterious package to her door — a package which informs her that her entire world is a lie.Suddenly forced to question everything she knows about herself and her family, Ridley wanders into dark territory she never knew existed, where everyone in her life seems like a stranger. She has no idea who’s on her side and who has something to hide—even, and maybe especially, her new lover, Jake, who appears to have secrets of his own.Sexy and fast-paced, Beautiful Lies is a true literary thriller with one of the freshest voices and heroines to arrive in years. Lisa Unger takes us on a breathtaking ride in which every choice Ridley makes creates a whirlwind of consequences that are impossible to imagine . . . .

What Fresh Hell


Lucy Vine - 2018
    Then she gets the whatsapp from her best friend Lauren to say she's just got engaged. And as maid of honour, Lilah just signed up for weekend wedding fairs and weekly planning meetings for the next year.Just when she thinks things can't get any worse, she's about to discover a new fresh hell.

I Thought You Said This Would Work


Ann Wertz Garvin - 2021
    It’s for the best. Samantha prefers to avoid conflict. The blisteringly honest Holly craves it. What they still have in common puts them both back on speed dial: a mutual love for Katie, their best friend of twenty-five years, now hospitalized with cancer and needing one little errand from her old college roomies.It’s simple: travel cross-country together, steal her loathsome ex-husband’s VW camper, find Katie’s diabetic Great Pyrenees at a Utah rescue, and drive him back home to Wisconsin. If it’ll make Katie happy, no favor is too big (one hundred pounds), too daunting (two thousand miles), or too illegal (ish), even when a boho D-list celebrity hitches a ride and drives the road trip in fresh directions.Samantha and Holly are following every new turn—toward second chances, unexpected romance, and self-discovery—and finally blowing the dust off the secret that broke their friendship. On the open road, they’ll try to put it back together—for themselves, and especially for the love of Katie.

Miss You


Kate Eberlen - 2016
    They just haven't met properly yet. And perhaps they never will . . . Today is the first day of the rest of your life is the motto on a plate in the kitchen at home, and Tess can't get it out of her head, even though she's in Florence for a final, idyllic holiday before university. Her life is about to change forever - but not in the way she expects. Gus and his parents are also on holiday in Florence. Their lives have already changed suddenly and dramatically. Gus tries to be a dutiful son, but longs to escape and discover what sort of person he is going to be. For one day, the paths of an eighteen-year-old girl and boy criss-cross before they each return to England.Over the course of the next sixteen years, life and love will offer them very different challenges. Separated by distance and fate, there's no way the two of them are ever going to meet each other properly . . . or is there?

Long Time Coming


Edie Claire - 2003
    But back at home, the past is ready and waiting to haunt her...Eighteen years have passed since Joy's childhood best friend, Jenny, met her death in a tragic car accident just a few days after their senior prom. A broken Joy left their small Kentucky hometown shortly after - determined never to come back. But when her father's illness forces her to return, she realizes that neither time nor distance have truly healed her troubled soul.Plagued with nightmares of the accident and crippled by a vague fear whose source she can't identify, Joy realizes that in order to move on she must face the truth behind several disturbing gaps in her memory of that fateful spring. But the only person who can help her is a man she despises - Jenny's erstwhile boyfriend Jeff, now a respected doctor, whose carelessness as a teenager was the cause of Jenny's horrendous death - and Joy's own emotional destruction. Can she ever forgive? She may have no choice but to try. Because both the danger she sensed - and the childhood friendship she treasured - now suddenly seem very much alive...

The Dust That Falls from Dreams


Louis de Bernières - 2015
    But their days of childhood innocence and adventure are destined to be followed by the apocalypse that will overwhelm their world as they come to adulthood.For Rosie, the path ahead is full of challenges: torn between her love for two young men, her sense of duty and her will to live her life to the full, she has to navigate her way through extraordinary times. Can she, and her sisters, build new lives out of the opportunities and devastations that follow the Great War?Louis de Bernières’ magnificent and moving novel follows the lives of an unforgettable cast of characters as the Edwardian age disintegrates into the Great War, and they strike out to seek what happiness can be salvaged from the ruins of the old world.

Is This It?


Hannah Tovey - 2021
    Ivy is skint, single, and scared that she isn't a 'hot mess' any more - she's a walking disaster.But one night, Ivy switches her phone off, peels last night's drunken pizza off the sofa, and makes a list. A list that changes everything . . .The new Ivy has a proper job. She goes on fancy dates in wine bars. She's starting to think: maybe 'faking it till you make it' is easy?But then she meets Scott.Curly-haired, sarcastic Scott.Sh*t.

The Nanny


Melissa Nathan - 2003
    With a new job that offers excitement; a cool car; and her own suite with a TV, DVD player, and a cell phone, how can she go wrong?Then she meets . . . the Fitzgeralds -- Dick and Vanessa and their unruly brood of rugrats who have suddenly been entrusted into Jo's care. There's eight-year-old "psycho-babe" Cassandra; bloodthirsty Zak, the six-year-old Terminator; and timid little Tallulah.So what else could go wrong? How about the arrival of Dick's children from his first marriage: teenage Toby and (gulp!) all-grown-up-and-very-nicely-at-that Josh the accountant? And now that she has to temporarily share her room with Josh, Jo's head is really in a spin -- because with her hometown beau still in the picture and a sexy possibility sleeping just a foot away, life has suddenly gotten very complicated indeed!

The Likely Resolutions of Oliver Clock


Jane Riley - 2020
    Is there really room for something as unpredictable as love? Oliver Clock has everything arranged just so. A steady job running the family funeral parlour. A fridge stocked with ready meals. A drawer full of colour-coded socks. A plan (of sorts) to stay trim enough for a standard-sized coffin. And in florist Marie, he’s even found the love of his life—not that she’s aware of it.When a terrible tragedy takes Marie out of his life but leaves him with her private journal, he discovers too late that she secretly loved him back. Faced now with an empty love life, a family funeral business in trouble, a fast-approaching fortieth birthday and a notebook of resolutions he’s never achieved, Oliver resolves to open himself up to love—and all the mess that comes along with it.But, with a habit of burying his feelings, can he learn to embrace his lovability and find the woman who will make him feel whole?

The Other Family


Joanna Trollope - 2010
    Yet there is one more shock to come when Richie’s will is read. It seems he never forgot the wife and son he left behind years ago—Margaret, who lives a quiet life of routine and work, and Scott, who never knew his famous father. Now two families are left to confront their losses and each other, and none of them will ever be the same. Witty, intelligent, and insightful, The Other Family is a story of modern family life from one of our most beloved authors of domestic fiction.

Things We Set on Fire


Deborah Reed - 2013
    Jackson, Vivvie’s husband, was shot and killed 30 years ago, and the ramifications have splintered the family into their own isolated remembrances and recriminations.This deeply personal, hauntingly melancholy look at the damages families inflict on each other – and the healing that only they can provide – is filled with flinty, flawed and complex people stumbling towards some kind of peace. Like Elizabeth Strout and Kazuo Isiguro, Deborah Reed understands a story and its inhabitants reveal themselves in the subtleties: the space between the thoughts, the sigh behind the smile, and the unreliable lies people tell themselves that ultimately reveal the deepest truths.

The A to Z of You and Me


James Hannah - 2015
    Now time is running out, and his life is falling apart. But he's going to put it back together again. His own way.This is a story about how far love must stretch to gather a life in pieces -- and about how a strong friendship never dies.