Book picks similar to
My Dearest Love by Emilie Loring


romance
fiction
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historical-clean-romance

Becoming Mrs. Lewis


Patti Callahan - 2018
    In a world where women were silenced, she found her voice.From New York Times bestselling author Patti Callahan comes an exquisite novel of Joy Davidman, the woman C. S. Lewis called “my whole world.” When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis—known as Jack—she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn’t holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford don and the beloved writer of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters. Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy traveled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak and poverty, discovering friendship and faith, and against all odds, finding a love that even the threat of death couldn’t destroy.In this masterful exploration of one of the greatest love stories of modern times, we meet a brilliant writer, a fiercely independent mother, and a passionate woman who changed the life of this respected author and inspired books that still enchant us and change us. Joy lived at a time when women weren’t meant to have a voice—and yet her love for Jack gave them both voices they didn’t know they had.At once a fascinating historical novel and a glimpse into a writer’s life, Becoming Mrs. Lewis is above all a love story—a love of literature and ideas and a love between a husband and wife that, in the end, was not impossible at all.

Paradise Bay


James Michael Pratt - 2002
    For all of Jack Santos' life, he was told that his father was killed in the Vietnam War. Then a twist of fate changes everything he thought he knew, and he discovers that his father isn't dead after all. Now Jack is hungry for everything he can find out about this father, Levi Harper. And the only link he has to the past is through Levi's journals. It is through these journals that Jack discovers who his father really is: his loves, dreams, hopes...and secrets. Can Jack discover the truth about his own life? And can he find the love that will always bring him back to Paradise Bay?

A Seeking Heart


Kim Vogel Sawyer - 2002
    In this tale, the life of Samantha OBrien, a young woman running from an abusive past, intersects that of the Klaassen family of Mountain Lake, Minnesota. The loving acceptance extended to her turns her world upsidedown as she learns, through them, that God doesnt care where shes been; He loves her exactly where she is. Samantha, by virtue of her fractured childhood, sees herself as less than lovable, and it is a hard battle for her to accepts that love. But when it does, its as if a rainbow bursts through Samanthas seeking heart.

Island of Dreams


Katherine Stone - 2000
    Then an accident at a wedding changes everything, and, as if compelled by a force of nature, she picks up and moves to Denver, a city she has never even visited. There she encounters architect Pierce Rourke, who has created an island exclusively for celebrating glorious weddings. Will his belief in love and dreams extend itself only to the lives of others? Or will this unlikely couple find a way to triumph over destiny?

Daisy Jones & The Six


Taylor Jenkins ReidTaylor Jenkins Reid - 2019
    in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go-Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.Another band getting noticed is The Six, led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

Such a Pretty Face


Cathy Lamb - 2010
    Since that day, a new Stevie has emerged, one who walks without wheezing, plants a garden for self-therapy, and builds and paints fantastical wooden chairs. At thirty-five, Stevie is the one thing she never thought she'd be: thin.But for everything that's changed, some things remain the same. Stevie's shyness refuses to melt away. She still can't look her neighbors' gorgeous great-nephew in the eye. The Portland law office where she works remains utterly dysfunctional, as does her family—the aunt, uncle, and cousins who took her in when she was a child. To top it off, her once supportive best friend clearly resents her weight loss.By far the biggest challenge in Stevie's new life lies in figuring out how to define her new self. Collaborating with her cousins to plan her aunt and uncle's problematic fortieth anniversary party, Stevie starts to find some surprising answers—about who she is, who she wants to be, and how the old Stevie evolved in the first place. And with each revelation, she realizes the most important part of her transformation may not be what she's lost, but the courage and confidence she's gathering, day by day.As achingly honest as it is witty, Such A Pretty Face is a richly insightful novel of one woman's search for love, family, and acceptance, of the pain we all carry—and the wonders that can happen when we let it go at last.

Where the Crawdads Sing


Delia Owens - 2018
    Kya Clark is barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when the popular Chase Andrews is found dead, locals immediately suspect her.But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life's lessons from the land, learning the real ways of the world from the dishonest signals of fireflies. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world—until the unthinkable happens.In Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens juxtaposes an exquisite ode to the natural world against a profound coming of age story and haunting mystery. Thought-provoking, wise, and deeply moving, Owens’s debut novel reminds us that we are forever shaped by the child within us, while also subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.The story asks how isolation influences the behavior of a young woman, who like all of us, has the genetic propensity to belong to a group. The clues to the mystery are brushed into the lush habitat and natural histories of its wild creatures.

Destiny Junction: Behind Every Door is a Life, and Behind Every Life is a Destiny


Michael R. Phillips - 2002
    As its name implies, however, it becomes the place where many people's lives meet destiny. Through one young lady's obedient Christian life and the work of the Holy Spirit subsequent to her murder, the lives of many people in the town of Destiny Junction are transformed. This is their story...a story about life...and what it means...or what it ought to mean.

Paris Time Capsule


Ella Carey - 2014
    But when she learns that she’s inherited the estate of a complete stranger—a woman named Isabelle de Florian—her life is turned upside down.Cat arrives in Paris to find that she is now the owner of a perfectly preserved Belle Époque apartment in the ninth arrondissement, and that the Frenchwoman’s family knew nothing about this secret estate. Amid these strange developments, Cat is left with burning questions: Who was Isabelle de Florian? And why did she leave the inheritance to Cat instead of her own family?As Cat travels France in search of answers, she feels her grasp on her New York life starting to slip. With long-buried secrets coming to light and an attraction to Isabelle de Florian’s grandson growing too intense to ignore, Cat will have to decide what to let go of, and what to claim as her own.

The Healing Place


Sharon Downing Jarvis - 1994
    She leaves behind the woman her ex-husband wanted her to be and hopes to find herself in a new, foreign place, a place to heal. Determined to isolate herself from relationships and practically the rest of the world, Liz settles in a small farming community south of Salt Lake City. She is gradually drawn into the lives of her neighbors, most of whom are LDS. She discovers wounds heal better in warmth and acceptance of friends.

After You Left


Carol Mason - 2017
    It isn’t the pain of him not being there—loneliness is manageable. The worst thing is not knowing why.When Justin walks out on Alice on their honeymoon, with no explanation apart from a cryptic note, Alice is left alone and bewildered, her life in pieces.Then she meets Evelyn, a visitor to the gallery where she works. It’s a seemingly chance encounter, but Alice gradually learns that Evelyn has motives, and a heartbreaking story, of her own. And that story has haunting parallels with Alice’s life.As Alice delves into the mystery of why Justin left her, the questions are obvious. But the answers may lie in the most unlikely of places…

Witness


E.G. Lewis - 2009
    As a young shepherd girl, she accompanied her father to a Bethlehem stable where she held the baby Jesus. She watched Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt, met the strange visitors from the East who’d followed a star to Bethlehem, and saw Herod’s soldiers kill the children of her village.You can experience life in Roman Judea as the Jewish people struggle under the burden of Caesar's armies and Herod's cruelty. Watch false Messiahs rise and fall and see the fatal retribution that followed. Feel the pain of the innocent bystanders left to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.Meet Shemu’el, the young man Rivkah believed God destined for her. But Rome tore them apart. Divided by fate, united by love, these two young people grow to separate adulthood, each with their dreams and desires unfulfilled, while the world of Rome and conquest moves inexorably on.Then, many years later, Rivkah finds herself in Jerusalem during the Passover. Trapped in a crowd, she is forced to watch three men being led to their execution. Her stomach drops when she realizes one of the men is Yeshua, the babe she held so many years before.Witness it all through the eyes of one who lived it.

Paper Roses


Amanda Cabot - 2009
    Leaving the past behind in Philadelphia, mail-order bride Sarah arrives in San Antonio ready to greet her groom, Austin Canfield, a man she has never met but whose letters have won her heart from afar. But there is one problem--he has died. And Sarah cannot go back East.As Sarah tries to reconcile herself to a future that is drastically changed, Austin's brother, Clay, struggles with his own muddled plans. Though he dislikes working on the family ranch and longs for a different life, Clay is driven to avenge his brother's death. But something between them is growing and neither Clay nor Sarah is ready to admit it. Book 1 of the Texas Dreams series, Paper Roses will sweep readers into the Hill Country with a tale of love and loss, closed doors and beautiful possibilities that will leave them wanting more.

Liars and Saints


Maile Meloy - 2003
    This novel tells a story of sex and longing, love and loss, and of the deceit that can lie at the heart of family relationships. Set in California, Liars and Saints follows four generations of the Catholic Santerre family from World War II to the present. In a family driven as much by jealousy and propriety as by love, an unspoken tradition of deceit is passed from generation to generation. When tragedy shatters their precarious domestic lives, it takes astonishing courage and compassion to bring them back together. By turns funny and disturbing, irreverent and profound, Liars and Saints is a masterful display of Maile Meloy's prodigious gifts and of her penetrating insight into an extraordinary American family and into the nature of human love.

Biting the Sun


Tanith Lee - 1977
    Not if you're Jang: a caste of libertine teenagers in the city of Four BEE. But when you're expected to make trouble--when you can kill yourself on a whim and return in another body, when you're encouraged to change genders at will and experience whatever you desire--you've got no reason to rebel...until making love and raising hell, daring death and running wild just leave you cold and empty.Ravenous for true adventures of the mind and body, desperate to find some meaning, one restless spirit finally bucks the system--and by shattering the rules, strikes at the very heart of a soulless society....