"If you like Catherine Cookson, Dilly Court and Katie Flynn, then you will love this breath-taking saga of one of love, passion, betrayal, tragedy and longing by much loved author Jess Foley. This unmissable and unputdownable saga is one you will never forget...
'Compulsive and well-paced' -- Wiltshire Times
'A gripping saga... What makes this particular novel such compelling reading is its expertly researched background... The author writes with exuberance and style, and the central characters are totally convincing.' -- Northampton Chronicle & Echo
'A stunning read' -- ***** Reader review
'Excellent read - I couldn't put in down' -- ***** Reader review
'This book is really good: it's sad, exciting, tragic - you have it all in this book' -- ***** Reader review
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ONE WOMAN'S STRUGGLE FOR HAPPINESS
Having spent her childhood with a cold, unfeeling stepmother, Lily Clair's life is changed for ever when she is sent as general maid to old friends of her family. When Joel - handsome son of a wealthy entrepreneur - enters her life, their meeting is for Lily, young and vulnerable, a revelation.
Riding high on the crest of her new-found happiness she is in no way prepared for the violent attack that comes in the night, or for its devastating, life-changing consequences. But she must live with the consequences as, with a shattered heart, she deals with one hand of fate after another.
In her search for happiness, Lily is a woman who will capture your heart and stay with you forever..."
"A Proper Family Holiday was the last thing Lucy was expecting to have. But as a penniless and partnerless house-painter with an expired lease on her flat and a twelve-year-old daughter, she could hardly turn down her parents' offer to take them on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Caribbean. She'd just have to put up with her sister Theresa (making no secret of preferring Tuscany as a holiday destination) and brother Simon (worrying that there might be some sinister agenda behind their parents' wish to take them all away) with their various spouses, teenagers, young children and au pair.
In a luxury hotel, with bright sunshine, swimming, diving, glorious food and friendly locals, any family tensions should have melted away in the fabulous heat. The children should have been angelic, the teenagers cheerful, the adults relaxed and happy. But...some problems just refuse to be left at home."
"The eighth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga.
Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City
Following the success of his New York Times bestseller Michael Tolliver Lives, Armistead Maupin’s Mary Ann in Autumn is a touching portrait of friendship, family, and fresh starts, as the City by the Bay welcomes back Mary Ann Singleton, the beloved Tales of the City heroine who started it all. A new chapter begins in the lives of both Mary Ann and Michael “Mouse” Tolliver when she returns to San Francisco to rejoin her oldest friend after years in New York City… the reunion that fans of Maupin’s beloved Tales of the City series have been awaiting for years."
"When life is at its best, the unimaginable can shatter everything you think you know...
Abigail Samuels has no reason to feel anything but joy on the morning her life falls apart. The epitome of the successful Jewish American woman, she is married to a well-known and respected accountant and is in the middle of planning her daughter Kayla's wedding. Kayla, too, wakes up that morning with the world in the palm of her hand. Having lived the charmed life of a well-loved child from a happy family, she is bright, pretty, a Harvard law student who has never really questioned the path she found herself on.
With a shocking suddenness, all that is smashed to pieces in ways they could never have dreamed. When a heartbroken Kayla runs away to a desert commune run by a charismatic mystic, Abigail rushes to save her, only to find that there is nothing more whole than a broken heart."
"From the writer of the Wexford novels and read by Isla Blair.
Once, when Benet was about fourteen, they had been in a train together, alone in the carriage, and Mopsa had tried to stab her with a carving knife. Threatened her with it, rather. Benet had been wondering why her mother had brought such a large handbag with her, a red one that didn’t go with the clothes she was wearing. Mopsa had shouted and laughed and said wild things and then she had put the knife back in her bag. But Benet had been very frightened by then. She lost her head and pulled the emergency handle that Mopsa had called the “communication cord”. The train stopped and there had been trouble for everyone involved and her father had been angry and grimly sad."
"From the bestselling author of Bee Season comes an astonishingly complex psychological drama with a simple setup: two eleven-year-old girls, best friends and fierce rivals, go into the woods. Only one comes out . . .
Leaders of a mercurial clique of girls, Celia and Djuna reigned mercilessly over their three followers. One afternoon, they decided to walk home along a forbidden road. Djuna disappeared, and for twenty years Celia blocked out how it happened.
The lie Celia told to conceal her misdeed became the accepted truth: everyone assumed Djuna had been abducted, though neither she nor her abductor was ever found. Celia's unconscious avoidance of this has meant that while she and her longtime boyfriend, Huck, are professionally successful, they've been unable to move forward, their relationship falling into a rut that threatens to bury them both.
Celia returns to her hometown to confess the truth, but her family and childhood friends don't believe her. Huck wants to be supportive, but his love can't blind him to all that contradicts Celia's version of the past.
Celia's desperate search to understand what happened to Djuna has powerful consequences. A deeply resonant and emotionally charged story, The False Friend explores the adults that children become-leading us to question the truths that we accept or reject, as well as the lies to which we succumb."
"Narrator Gladys Cailiff is eleven years old in 1938 when a new schoolteacher turns Threestep, Georgia, upside down. Miss Grace Spivey is a well-traveled young woman who believes in field trips, Arabian costumes, and reading aloud from her ten-volume set of The Thousand Nights and a Night. The real trouble begins when she decides to revive the annual town festival as an exotic Baghdad bazaar. Miss Spivey and her project transform the lives of everyone around her: Gladys' older brother Force (with his movie-star looks), their pregnant sister May (a gifted storyteller herself), and especially the Cailiffs' African American neighbor, young Theo Boykin, whose creative genius becomes the key to a colorful, hidden history of the South.
Populated by unforgettable characters-including three impressive camels-The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia rides a magic carpet from a segregated schoolroom in Georgia to the banks of the Tigris-and back again-in an entrancing feat of storytelling."
"“A fabulously entertaining new quartet—with links to her popular Cynster series….Laurens adds a dash of exotic spice to her always reliable mix of sexy romance and risky intrigue.”
—Booklist
The fourth book in New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Stephanie Laurens’s sensational Black Cobra Quartet, The Reckless Bride is a brilliant mix of intrigue, danger, and historical romance from one of the very best in the business. A breathtaking adventure set in England’s Regency Era, The Reckless Bride continues the acclaimed romance novelist’s extraordinary chronicle of love and duty, as brave ex-officers of the Crown band together to destroy the traitorous fiend known as The Black Cobra."
"Sixty-eight-year-old Hattie Kong, descendant of Confucius, daughter of an American missionary, has lived to see both her husband and her best friend die back-to-back in a single year: "It was like having twins…She got to book the same church with the same pianist for both funerals and did think she should have gotten some sort of twofer from the crematorium."
But two years later, it's time for Hattie to start over. She moves to a small New England town where she is soon joined by a Cambodian American family and an ex-lover-now a retired neuroscientist-all of them looking for their own new lives.
What Hattie makes of this situation and of the changing town of Riverlake-challenged as it is, in 2001, by fundamentalist Christians, struggling family farms, and unexpected immigrants-lies at the center of a novel that asks deep and absorbing questions about religion, home, and what "worlds" we make of the world.
Moving, humorous, and broad-ranging, World and Town is rich in character and brilliantly evocative of its time and place. This is a masterful novel from one of our most admired writers."
