The Noel Collection

The Christmas season is supposed to be full of joy, but not for Mark Smart. Life has dealt him one blow after another, until one snowy November night, when he meets a beautiful young woman who will change his life forever. Macy Wood has little memory of her birth parents, and memories she'd rather forget of her adopted home.

Sally Walther feels like her world is imploding. Publicly humiliated after her husband, a councilman, is arrested for bigamy, and her subsequent divorce, she has isolated herself from the world. When her only friend insists that Sally climb out of her hole and embrace the season, Sally decides to put up a Christmas tree and heads off to buy one - albeit reluctantly. She is immediately taken by Andrew, the kind, handsome man who owns the Christmas tree lot and delivers her tree. She soon learns Andrew is single and new to her city and, like her, is also starting his life anew.

Jason Chercher is not doing well in love or life. Just two weeks after his wife leaves him, he receives a phone call that his estranged mother has passed away, days before Christmas - leaving her home and all her belongings to him. Frankly, he would like to see everything just burned. But curiosity about his past and anxiety about his future fuels him to make the drive from Salt Lake City to her home in Medford, Oregon. Maybe cleaning out her house will be slightly less depressing than spending the holidays alone, watching reruns of Christmas classics.

In this new offering from “the king of Christmas fiction” (The New York Times), number one best-selling author Richard Paul Evans shares a story of heart, loyalty, and hope as he explores the deeper meaning of the holiday season and asks what it truly means to love and forgive. The year is 1975. Elle Sheen - a single mother who is supporting herself and her six-year-old, African-American son, Dylan, as a waitress at the Noel Street Diner - isn’t sure what to make of William Smith when his appearance creates a stir in the small town of Mistletoe, Utah.

After nearly two decades, Noel Post, an editor for a major New York publishing house, returns to her childhood home in Salt Lake City to see her estranged, dying father. What she believed would be a brief visit turns into something more as she inherits the bookstore her father fought to keep alive. Reeling from loneliness, a recent divorce, and unanticipated upheavals in her world, Noel begins receiving letters from an anonymous source, each one containing thoughts and lessons about her life and her future.