Little Mishaps and Big Surprises


C.J. Morrow - 2018
    She certainly doesn’t need a man to complete her. Her life couldn’t be better. Or could it?Charlie’s life is about to change. From an episode of doggy incontinence to a vomit incident in the M&S food hall, life has some little mishaps planned for Charlie that lead to some BIG surprises.With a fancy dress party looming, what begins as a drunken nightmare could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to her.

Harvesting the Heart


Jodi Picoult - 1993
    Now, having left her father behind in Chicago for dreams of art school and marriage to an ambitious young doctor, she finds herself with a child of her own. But her mother's absence and shameful memories of her past force her to doubt whether she could ever be capable of bringing joy and meaning into the life of her child, gifts her own mother never gave.Harvesting the Heart is written with astonishing clarity and evocative detail, convincing in its depiction of emotional pain, love, and vulnerability, and recalls the writing of Alice Hoffman and Kristin Hannah. Out of Paige's struggle to find wholeness, Jodi Picoult crafts an absorbing novel peopled by richly drawn characters, and explores motherhood with a power and depth only she is capable of.“A brilliant, moving examination of motherhood, brimming with detail and emotion.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch“Jodi Picoult explores the fragile ground of ambivalent motherhood in her lush second novel. This story belongs to… the lucky reader.” —The New York Times Book Review

The Sisters Café


Carolyn Brown - 2013
    She's taken step one and gotten engaged to a reliable man, but she's beginning to question their relationship. Does he really love her, or is she just arm candy for his political career? Why is her future mother-in-law getting increasingly hostile? Worse, why does he stand up for his mother when she says those awful things, instead of protecting her? Cathy is full of self-doubt. Both of her options—going through with the wedding or breaking off her engagement—are beginning to look like a nightmare either way. She knows her friends will back her up, but she's the one who has to make a decision that's going to tear her apart.

Lilliana Jones and the Temple of Groom


Rich Amooi - 2016
    The only thing separating Lilly from true love is the fear of flying, lactose intolerance, a scandal with the Pope, and the sexy Italian she meets on the plane.

Love Among the Chickens


P.G. Wodehouse - 1906
    Upon meeting Ukridge for the first time in years, Garnet finds himself enmeshed Ukridge's new and struggling chicken farm. Garnet soon falls in love with a girl living near the estate as he struggles with the farm and with Ukridge's bizarre business methods.Written when he was 25, Love Among the Chickens launched P.G. Wodehouse's career as a novelist and introduced the world to Ukridge, one of his most extraordinary inventions. Robert McCrum's introduction shows how this fascinating early book holds within it so many of the themes which Wodehouse was to make his own. This edition uses Wodehouse's 1920 revised edition of the 1906 original.

One Perfect Summer


Paige Toon - 2012
    She's eighteen and on the brink of starting university, while Joe's life is seemingly going nowhere. But despite their differences, the pair fall hopelessly and desperately in love. And then summer comes to an end and they are dramatically torn apart.Alice heads off to university in Cambridge where she gets a part-time job punting on the River Cam and slowly picks up the pieces of her broken heart. One day Lukas - a gorgeous golden boy from Cambridge University - spies her and it's not long before Alice falls for his charms. Months turns into years, but then Joe comes back into Alice's life again in a way that she could never have imagined. While Alice lives her ordinary life with Lukas, she has to watch from the sidelines as Joe's life becomes evermore extraordinary. She never stopped loving him, but he's out of her reach now, surely? And what about Lukas?

A Case of Serendipity


K.J. Farnham - 2018
    If Bucky’s Beans doesn’t stop spamming her phone with discount codes for frou-frou java concoctions, she’s going to flip. After multiple failed attempts to unsubscribe, Ruth takes to the company’s Facebook page to vent her frustration over the never-ending texts.When attorney, Henry Mancuso, stumbles upon Ruth’s complaint, he has no idea that a simple Facebook scroll is going to change his life. Now, he has to get Ruth to agree to a class action lawsuit when she’s just looking for some peace on her mobile device—not a drawn-out case against a coffeehouse giant.As Ruth and Henry battle the legal waters, a friendship full of fun and spontaneity blooms. But could something more be brewing between these two and this coffeehouse case?

High Wages


Dorothy Whipple - 1930
    It is about a girl called Jane who gets a badly-paid job in a draper’s shop in the early years of the last century. Yet the title of the book is based on a Carlyle quotation – ‘Experience doth take dreadfully high wages, but she teacheth like none other’ – and Jane, having saved some money and been lent some by a friend, opens her own dress-shop.As Jane Brocket writes in her Persephone Preface: the novel ‘is a celebration of the Lancastrian values of hard work and stubbornness, and there could be no finer setting for a shop-girl-made-good story than the county in which cotton was king.’

I Adopted My Mom at the Bus Station


Savannah Hendricks - 2020
    Having a fear of germs is inconvenient when you’re on a road-trip adventure. However, needing to know what it’s like to have a mom, and to finally see the beach means more than anything to an eleven-year-old.Some twenty years later, a man Sandy never wanted to see again shows up at her doorstep. When Sandy’s best friend places an ultimate life-changing decision in her hands, Sandy must venture back down the road, this time with the father she hates.Making these decisions will be much easier with Justin, a long-time friend, by Sandy’s side. Yet, Justin’s help only leads to continued mixed emotions Sandy has been fighting for some time.Sandy is searching for what she lost, but will she accept what she finds? A journey rich in history, the truth, and determining forgiveness with a touch of humor is the portrait of life.

The Corner Shop in Cockleberry Bay


Nicola May - 2018
    But nothing is straightforward about this legacy. While the identity of her benefactor remains a mystery, he - or she - has left one important legal proviso: that the shop cannot be sold, only passed on to somebody who really deserves it. Rosa makes up her mind to give it a go: to put everything she has into getting the shop up and running again in the small seaside community of Cockleberry Bay. But can she do it all on her own? And if not, who will help her succeed - and who among the following will work secretly to see her fail? There is a handsome rugby player, a sexy plumber, a charlatan reporter and a selection of meddling locals. Add in a hit and run incident and the disappearance of a valuable engraved necklace – and what you get is a journey of self-discovery and unpredictable events. With surprising and heartfelt results, Rosa, accompanied at all times by her little sausage dog Hot, will slowly unravel the shadowy secrets of the inheritance, and also bring her own, long-hidden heritage into the light.

Love


Angela Carter - 1971
    With surgical precision it charts the destructive emotional war between a young woman, her husband and his disruptive brother as they move through a labyrinth of betrayal, alienation and lost connections. This revised edition has lost none of Angela Carter's haunting power to evoke the ebb of the 1960s, and includes an afterword which describes the progress of the survivors into the anguish of middle age.

Evelina


Frances Burney - 1778
    As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of pleasure-gardens, theatre visits, and balls. But Evelina's innocence also makes her a shrewd commentator on the excesses and absurdities of manners and social ambitions—as well as attracting the attention of the eminently eligible Lord Orville. Evelina, comic and shrewd, is at once a guide to fashionable London, a satirical attack on the new consumerism, an investigation of women's position in the late eighteenth century, and a love story. The new introduction and full notes to this edition help make this richness all the more readily available to a modern reader.

Dancing With Lies


Summer Cooper - 2021
    until he appeared.Lincoln-the swim team captain turned tech billionaire.Gorgeous, clean-shaven, and... oh so vanilla. There's no space for him in this dark world of hers.Especially if she wants to leave the past where it belongs and her secrets hidden.DANCING WITH LIES is a full-length novel containing mature language and adult scenes. It's the first book in the Barre To Bar series.

Back to the Bedroom


Janet Evanovich - 1989
    From the #1 "New York Times" bestselling creator of the Stephanie Plum series comes a revised, repackaged classic novel involving a driven redheaded musician, a sexy slacker, love at first sight, a lovable gun-toting granny, suspicious neighbors, and a thrilling mystery.For months he'd thought of her as the Mystery Woman, draped in a black velvet cloak, with outrageous red curls, flawless skin, and carrying a large, odd case--but the night David Dodd saw a helicopter drop a chunk of metal through the roof of his lovely neighbor's bedroom, he got to meet the formidable and delightful Katherine Finn at last! Rescuing damsels and fixing roofs was dangerous work, he told her, and at the very least he deserved a kiss--didn't he? Kate couldn't argue with Dave's logic, but how could she, the driven concert musician with more commitments than hours in the day, be falling head over heels for a likable cuddler who seemed to be drifting through life? No one had ever made her feel as cherished or desirable, and she'd never had so much fun, but even though her eccentric boarder, Elsie, assured her that where Kate was concerned Dave had plenty of ambition, could she really love a guy who was just smart, sexy and rich?

Excellent Women


Barbara Pym - 1952
    Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those "excellent women," the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors--anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door--the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.