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.

Alice has a scrupulously organised, comfortable life in West London with Noel - her second husband whose main ambition in life is to sharpen his golf handicap in time for retirement. But Alice’s once-famous bohemian mother, Jocelyn, residing in shabby splendour in a crumbling house on a clifftop in Cornwall, becomes ill and Alice, with her daughter and stepson, goes to look after her. What she finds there appals her.

Funerals are strange things. Kitty hadn't really wanted to go to this one - a old school friend she hadn't seen for years - and she hadn't bargained for the way it made her think of the past. In particular, it made her think of the baby she had given birth to when she was eighteen, the baby her parents had insisted she give away for adoption. She'd called her Madeleine, and she remembered her every day, what she was like, if she was happy.

When Leonie Baxter finds herself out of a job and out of a relationship, she’s at her wits end. Her life has just been turned upside down and she needs a plan, fast. By chance, on a walk with her rescue puppy, Leonie stumbles across a striking house in the woods; fully furnished but unoccupied. As a journalist, she is determined to find out more, after all, reporting is in her nature. But her attempts are thwarted by Lily Cruickshank who lives in the cottage next door. 

All Marnie wants is somewhere to call home. Mourning lost years spent in a marriage that has finally come to an end, she needs a fresh start and time to heal. Things she hopes to find in the rural west Lancashire village her mother always told her about. With nothing but her two green thumbs, Marnie takes a job as a gardener, which comes with a little cottage to make her own. The garden is beautiful - filled with roses, lavender and honeysuckle - and only a little rough around the edges. Which is more than can be said for her next-door neighbour, Ned Mars.