Rural Life

★★ Do you love Irish romance? Fall in love with sweet, small-town, clean and wholesome romances. These stories are filled with delightful characters and brimming with Irish Joy! ★★ The four books in this collection include: OH DANNY BOY A reader favorite! This pot of gold could hold more than they bargained for… Grand. Just grand. Clara Donovan’s failure to keep her brother from going off the rails—again—is a public spectacle. Including a handsome stranger who puts down his guitar case to help her talk Seamus down from Farthing’s tallest bridge. Everything about Danny ...

When a young man is found lying on a station platform with a hole in his head, DI Kate Young is called in to investigate the grisly murder. But the killing is no one-off. As bodies start to pile up, she is faced with what might be an impossible task - to hunt down a ruthless killer on a seemingly random rampage.

For years, Isobel Latimer has composed serious novels for serious people, but to dwindling acclaim and ever-more dwindling gain. Now her husband is ill and she must carry their financial burden alone, and in secret. But if the public don’t want careful moral fables any longer, why not provide an outrageous tale of sex and satanism, and an author to match? The incomparable, uncontrollable Zelda de Vere is born.

Where does one go, you might ask, when the world falls apart? When the immutable facts of your life—the mundane, the trivial, the take-for-granted minutiae that once filled every second of every day—suddenly disappear? Where does one go in such dire and unexpected circumstances? I went home, of course.

It's the winter of 1967, and snow is on the ground in the colorful Irish village of Ballybucklebo, but the chilly weather can't stop love from warming hearts all over the county. Not just the love between a man and woman, as with young doctor Barry Laverty and his fiancée, Sue Nolan, who are making plans to start a new life together, but also the love of an ailing pensioner for a faithful dog that's gone missing, the love of the local gentry for the great estate they are on the verge of losing, or Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly's love for his longtime home and practice.

Violet Clarke is ready to take over the world, one strawberry at a time, after she inherits her grandfather's old farm. That's the plan, at least... But when firefighter, William Baxter, shows up for a routine safety inspection, he informs her in no uncertain terms that her raspberry-themed world takeover is shut down until she fixes the berry farm's storage shed. Yes, she understands it's a fire disaster waiting to happen. No, she doesn't have any money for repairs, Will. So when the rough and rugged fireman returns, offering her his grumpiest help to restore the shed, well... She can't ...

Writing with the telegraphic swiftness and microscopic sensitivity that have made her one of our most distinguished journalists, Joan Didion creates a shimmering novel of innocence and evil. A Book of Common Prayer is the story of two American women in the derelict Central American nation of Boca Grande. Grace Strasser-Mendana controls much of the country's wealth and knows virtually all of its secrets; Charlotte Douglas knows far too little.

Long before Hank Crawford arrived in the waters of Ketchikan, his partners and compatriots were already in love with its shores. Following the final, crushing moments of World War II, Japanese officer Kiyoshi Tsurifune, Sergeant Jones Henry, and Resistance fighter Swede Scorden struggle to regain normalcy and any contact with the shimmering, fish-filled sea. Lost honor, fallen friends, their cultural identities gone in the wake of a nuclear blast - these fishermen-turned-soldiers have a long way to go till they regain the waters in which they feel most at home.

Welcome back to Willow Heights! After the fright that Michael gave everyone in the last book, he and Ruby find themselves in Willow Heights together. Will Michael finally see Ruby as a woman and not just his little sister’s best friend? Will his failed engagement stop him from allowing his heart to love again? Will Ruby forgive Michael for never appreciating her before? Will this turn to be just a friendship or the love story they always dreamed of? Who else will reconnect in book seven of the Willow Heights series?

Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma in search of the promised land of California. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and powerlessness, yet out of their struggle Steinbeck created a drama that is both intensely human and majestic in its scale and moral vision.

I can’t hear myself think. Loud noises were coming from next door. What the hell is that noise? My new neighbor, that’s what! I storm out of my office and bang on the door. The door swings open, “Well, hello, Beautiful! How can I make you mine?” he says. With an eye roll and frustration, I complain about the noise. He hands me some noise-cancelling headphones. What about my client?! He hands me another set of noise-cancelling headphones. "How am I supposed to hear her?" “Oh. Not sure.” He says. “With your ears, maybe?” His eyes watch mine; they twinkle with mischievousness I...

Seventeen-year-old Veronica "Ronnie" Miller's life was turned upside-down when her parents divorced and her father moved from New York City to Wilmington, North Carolina. Three years later, she remains angry and alienated from her parents, especially her father...until her mother decides it would be in everyone's best interest if she spent the summer in Wilmington with him. Ronnie's father, a former concert pianist and teacher, is living a quiet life in the beach town, immersed in creating a work of art that will become the centerpiece of a local church.

Sisters Amanda Foster and Erin Turner have little in common except the childhood bedroom they once shared and the certainty each feels that her way of life is best. Amanda follows the rules - at the school where she works; in her community; and as a picture-perfect daughter, wife, and mother-to-be. Erin follows her heart - in love and otherwise - living a bohemian lifestyle on a shoestring budget and honoring her late father’s memory with a passion for music and her fledgling bath-products business.

Set against the backdrop of an eerie island town in the dead of winter, The Wife and the Widow is an unsettling thriller told from two perspectives: Kate, a widow whose grief is compounded by what she learns about her dead husband’s secret life; and Abby, an island local whose world is turned upside when she’s forced to confront the evidence of her husband’s guilt. But nothing on this island is quite as it seems, and only when these women come together can they discover the whole story about the men in their lives.

This collection of humorous columns for a rural parish magazine reflects life all year round in a small English village in the beautiful Cotswolds countryside where the author has lived since 1991. Easy to dip into, this light-hearted volume provides entertaining reading for anyone interested in modern rural community life and the real-life equivalent of the fictional village of Wendlebury Barrow, the parish that is the setting for Debbie Young's fiction books. It is the sequel to All Part of the Charm, a collection of nostalgic essays and parish magazine columns. Debbie Young also writes...

Liz Weston’s life has reached rock bottom. Her husband dumped her, her life savings are gone, and her apartment is being turned into condos that she can’t afford. Maybe she shouldn’t have taken early retirement last year? In her late 40s, she has limited possibilities for employment. When her elderly father passes away, she heads to her hometown to clean out the family home. Staying at the beachside inn is a blessing because there’s no way she’ll sleep in her childhood home. But when she befriends Jane Miller, the owner of Tides, her life slowly starts to change.

"It's your job now," Anna says as she hands Caleb her journals, asking him to continue writing the family story. But Sarah, Jacob, Anna, Caleb, and their new little sister, Cassie, have already formed a family, and Caleb fears there will be nothing left to write about. That is, before Cassie discovers a mysterious old man in the barn, and everything changes. Everyone is excited about the arrival of a new family member—except for Jacob, who holds a bitter grudge. Only the special love of Caleb, and the gift he offers, can help to mend the pain of the past.

There are a few things Jeremy Marsh was sure he'd never do: he'd never leave New York City; never give his heart away again after barely surviving one failed marriage; and, most of all, never become a parent. Now, Jeremy is living in the tiny town of Boone Creek, North Carolina, married to Lexie Darnell, the love of his life, and anticipating the birth of their daughter. Just as his life seems to be settling into a blissful pattern, an unsettling, mysterious message re-opens old wounds and sets off a chain of events that will forever change the course of this young couple's marriage.

After witnessing the death of his younger brother in a terrible home accident, 14-year-old Kevin and his grieving mother are sent for the summer to live with Kevin's grandfather. In this peeled-paint coal town deep in Appalachia, Kevin quickly falls in with a half-wild hollow kid named Buzzy Fink who schools him in the mysteries and magnificence of the woods. The events of this fateful summer will affect the entire town of Medgar, Kentucky.

Long before Dr. Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly made most listeners’ acquaintance in Patrick Taylor's best-selling novel An Irish Country Doctor, he appeared in a series of humorous columns originally published in Stitches: The Journal of Medical Humour. These warm and wryly amusing vignettes provide an early glimpse at the redoubtable Dr. O’Reilly as he tends to the colourful and eccentric residents of Ballybucklebo, a cozy Ulster village nestled in the bygone years of the early '60s.