Book picks similar to
Tell Me of Brave Women by Laura Riley


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Snowday: A festive feel good romantic comedy (The Riverside Series Book 1)


B.R. Maycock - 2018
     Eloise is too busy juggling the chaos of three kids, an ever present ex-husband and a demanding boss to even remember the last time dating crossed her mind. But as soft snow falls silently all around, romance twinkles with the flakes. After being single for so long, Eloise suddenly has a lot of choices. Too many choices. Will anyone be worthy of melting the guard around her heart to let love in? A fun-filled, festive read for fans of Christie Barlow, Fiona Gibson and Colleen Coleman

All the Fun of the Fair: A hilarious, brilliantly original coming-of-age story that will capture your heart


Caroline Hulse - 2021
    

Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes


Kathleen West - 2020
    Julia resents teachers like Isobel, who effortlessly bond with students, including Julia's own teenagers, who have started pulling further away from her.Isobel has spent her teaching career in Liston Heights side-stepping the community's high-powered families. But when she receives a threatening voicemail accusing her of Anti-Americanism and a "blatant liberal agenda," she realizes she's squarely in the fray. Rather than cowering, Isobel doubles down on her social-justice ideals. Meanwhile, Julia, obsessed with the casting of the high school's winter musical, inadvertently shoves the female student lead after sneaking onto the school campus. The damning video footage goes viral and has far-reaching consequences for Julia and her entire family.With nothing to unite them beyond the sting of humiliation from public meltdowns, Isobel and Julia will find common ground where they least expect it, confronting a secret Facebook gossip site that's stirring up more trouble for this tumultuous, fractured school community.

The Birthday Girls


Pauline Lawless - 2013
    Their friendship has now lasted thirty-five years. As their birthdays all fall in the same week they long ago made a pact to spend each big decade birthday together. So far they'd managed it. Now as their thirty-ninth birthday looms, Angel, a famous Hollywood actress, announces that this will be her last birthday. Terrified of aging, she absolutely refuses to turn forty. So Lexi, the mother hen of the group and an artist, invites them to Florida for a week-long celebration of this, their last birthday together. Brenda, mother to five grown-up children, flies in from Dublin, eagerly looking forward to her first foreign holiday ever. Mel, however, has to be prised away from New York where she is a successful partner in a law firm - she is a workaholic with no other friends or love in her life. The four come together for the celebration but soon things start to unravel and the week ends disastrously. Lexi is distraught. Can their friendship endure? Only time will tell.

Paper Wings


Marly Swick - 1996
    They simply accept them as fact and enjoy the moments when she emerges from them, buoyant and energetic. With Kennedy's election, presidency and assassination as background, Suzanne tells the story of the dissolution, and ultimate redemption, of her family. Sure to appeal to readers of Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Hoffman and Mona Simpson, Paper Wings is a subtle and moving novel about a mother and daughter who struggle, hope, and learn from each other how to emerge from shadows of tragedy.

The Best Boomerville Hotel


Caroline James - 2018
    One hotel refurbishment later and the Best Boomerville Hotel is open for business! Perhaps not surprisingly Boomerville attracts more than its fair share of eccentric clientele: there’s fun-loving Sir Henry Mulberry and his brother Hugo; Lucinda Brown, an impoverished artist with more ego than talent; Andy Mack, a charming Porsche-driving James Bond lookalike, as well as Kate Simmons, a woman who made her fortune from an internet dating agency but still hasn’t found ‘the One’ herself. With such an array of colourful individuals there’s bound to be laughs aplenty, but could there be tears and heartbreak too and will the residents get more than they bargained for at Boomerville?

An Unfinished Story


Boo Walker - 2020
    Claire finally finds the courage to move on; then she discovers among the remnants of her shattered world her husband’s last manuscript. It’s intimate, stirring—and unfinished. An idea comes to her…What if she can find someone to give David’s novel the ending it deserves?Whitaker Grant is famous for his one and only bestselling novel—a masterpiece that became a hit film. But after being crippled by the pressure of success and his failed marriage, Whitaker retreated from the public eye in his native St. Petersburg, Florida. Years later, he’s struggling through a deep midlife crisis. Until he receives an intriguing request from a lonely widow. To honor David’s story, Whitaker must understand, heart and soul, the man who wrote it and the woman he left behind.There’s more to the novel than anyone dreamed. Something personal. Something true. Maybe, in bringing a chapter of David’s life to a close, Claire and Whitaker can find hope for a new beginning.

The Summer We Danced


Fiona Harper - 2016
    So she returns to the small Kent village where she grew up to make a fresh start. Little did she know that would mean saving her beloved childhood dance school or falling for her old school crush Tom too!

Gaining Visibility


Pamela Hearon - 2016
    In her late forties, Julia is now used to being invisible. But even if she has to do it alone, she’s determined to celebrate her victory over breast cancer by hiking Italy’s Cinque Terre. And while she’s there, she can scout out treasures for her interior design business back in Kentucky.   Invigorated by the beauty of the Italian countryside, Julia seems unstoppable, until she’s injured by a rock—one that happens to belong to thirty-something stone mason Vitale DeLuca. Reluctantly, Julia accepts Vitale’s insistent offer of lodging while she recovers. But in his home, amid his exquisite sculptures, Julia sees beyond his charm and looks to something special: a talent she must bring to the world’s attention. And once she does, she plans to step aside to leave him in the spotlight. But Vitale has seen something in Julia too, something she is no longer able to recognize in herself. And he is determined to find a way to show it to her.   Poignant and uplifting, Gaining Visibility is an exhilarating story of one woman’s realization that even the deepest scars have a beauty of their own—and that it’s time to take her place in the sun once more.

Margaret Goes Modern


Frances O'Roark Dowell - 2017
     Meet Margaret, whose adventures in a new quilting group help her reconnect with her daughter as they grieve the slow loss of a loved one to Alzheimer’s. Then there’s Liz, a quilter seeking her own tribe in a neighborhood of perfect moms. But maybe she has more in common with her neighbors than she thinks. Sisters Amanda and Lucy, one dreamy, the other practical as the day is long, have financial woes that may force them to sell their beloved home. Can a quilt made with fabric from a mysterious aunt save the day? Lisa is still reckoning with the loss of her best friend. Diving headfirst into a new quilt project, she learns that sometimes a gift can be a first step toward healing. Melissa Bennett is sensible, smart and skeptical of marriage. A husband sounds nice, but with all the books and quilts in her life, where would she put him?

The Wishing Hill


Holly Robinson - 2013
    Now her marriage is over, and she’s alone, selling watercolors to tourists on the Puerto Vallarta boardwalk. When her brother asks her to come home to wintery New England and care for their ailing mother, a flamboyant actress with a storied past, Juliet goes reluctantly. She and her self-absorbed mother have always clashed. Plus, nobody back home knows about her divorce—or the fact that she’s pregnant and her ex-husband is not the father. Juliet intends to get her mother back on her feet and return to Mexico fast, but nothing goes as planned. Instead she meets a man who makes her question every choice and reawakens her spirit, even as she is being drawn into a long-running feud between her mother and a reclusive neighbor. Little does she know that these relationships hold the key to shocking secrets about her family and herself that have been hiding in plain sight.…CONVERSATION GUIDE INCLUDED

The High Blue Arena


Jack Prendergast - 2012
    Can a couple of rural coppers and a demoralised ragbag of accountant soldiers intercept the two boys, before they blunder into an old firing range infested with unexploded ordnance?Moira can at least rely on two unlikely allies; her estranged African friend Dahlila, and Social Worker Mildred Pierce. Even so, the beast has picked up her trail; as the double pursuit races toward a terrifying climax, Hardcastle will have to tap every ounce of his wavering resolve in order to halt an unstoppable madman. Yet even murderers have mothers, and ultimately, it is love that must prevail; thanks in no small part to the inexhaustible optimism and humanity of four remarkable women...

The Things We Wish Were True


Marybeth Mayhew Whalen - 2016
    But behind the white picket fences lies a web of secrets that reach from house to house.Up and down the streets, neighbors quietly bear the weight of their own pasts—until an accident at the community pool upsets the delicate equilibrium. And when tragic circumstances compel a woman to return to Sycamore Glen after years of self-imposed banishment, the tangle of the neighbors’ intertwined lives begins to unravel.During the course of a sweltering summer, long-buried secrets are revealed, and the neighbors learn that it’s impossible to really know those closest to us. But is it impossible to love and forgive them?

The Overdue Life of Amy Byler


Kelly Harms - 2019
    So when the guilt-ridden husband who abandoned her shows up and offers to take care of their kids for the summer, she accepts his offer and escapes rural Pennsylvania for New York City.Usually grounded and mild mannered, Amy finally lets her hair down in the city that never sleeps. She discovers a life filled with culture, sophistication, and—with a little encouragement from her friends—a few blind dates. When one man in particular makes quick work of Amy’s heart, she risks losing herself completely in the unexpected escape, and as the summer comes to an end, Amy realizes too late that she must make an impossible decision: stay in this exciting new chapter of her life, or return to the life she left behind.But before she can choose, a crisis forces the two worlds together, and Amy must stare down a future where she could lose both sides of herself, and every dream she’s ever nurtured, in the beat of a heart.

The Hideaway


Lauren K. Denton - 2017
    She intends to quickly tie up loose ends then return to her busy life and thriving antique shop in New Orleans. Instead, she learns Mags has willed The Hideaway to her and charged her with renovating it—no small task considering her grandmother’s best friends, a motley crew of senior citizens, still live there.Rather than hurrying back to New Orleans, Sara stays in Sweet Bay and begins the biggest house-rehabbing project of her career. Amid drywall dust, old memories, and a charming contractor, she discovers that slipping back into life at The Hideaway is easier than she expected.Then she discovers a box Mags left in the attic with clues to a life Sara never imagined for her grandmother. With help from Mags’s friends, Sara begins to piece together the mysterious life of bravery, passion, and choices that changed her grandmother’s destiny in both marvelous and devastating ways.When an opportunistic land developer threatens to seize The Hideaway, Sara is forced to make a choice—stay in Sweet Bay and fight for the house and the people she’s grown to love or leave again and return to her successful but solitary life in New Orleans.