Showing titles in Women's Fiction

Cheerful Gunnilde Payne is hiding a bruised heart behind her bright smile. When her friend invites her to spend some time away from her provincial home, she jumps at the chance. All is going well, until Gunnilde overhears herself rudely dismissed by two knights, as “nice, and eminently forgettable.” Poor Gunnilde is mortified. Then, she decides to take her future in her hands and seize the chances life puts before her. She will go to the royal court in Aphrany. She will attract the attention of the Queen and become one of her ladies-in-waiting!

It all started with a mysterious blue note sewn into a wedding dress. Something blue. I’d gone to sell my own unworn bridal gown at a vintage clothing store. That’s when I found another bride’s “something old". Stitched into the lining of a fabulously feathered design was the loveliest message I’d ever read: Thank you for making all of my dreams come true.

After a devastating accident crushed my dreams, I ended up back in my hometown teaching kindergarten. I was trying to make the best of it. That is, until the world I had to leave behind, showed up in my classroom in the form of a five-year-old little girl. Her father living the exact life I almost had. Adam Jacobson is known as the bad boy of rock. While he and his band tour the world, they leave a trail of mayhem. What no one knows is behind the music is a caring, straightedge man with a secret-a daughter who the world is about to discover.

The third volume in the best-selling Wideacre trilogy. Set in the 18th century, they launched the career of Philippa Gregory, the best-selling author of The Other Boleyn Girl and Three Sisters, Three Queens. Meridon, a desolate Romany girl, is determined to escape the hard poverty of her childhood. Riding bareback in a travelling show while her sister, Dandy, risks her life on the trapeze, Meridon dedicates herself to freeing them both from danger and want.

At the Manhattan knitting store founded by Georgia Walker, the members of the Friday Night Knitting Club - including Georgia’s college-age daughter, Dakota - rely on each other for help, even as they struggle with new challenges. As the club’s projects - an afghan, baby booties, a wedding coat - are pieced together, so is their understanding of the patterns underlying the stresses and joys of being a mother, wife, daughter, and friend.

Samantha thrives under pressure. A high-powered London lawyer, all she can concentrate on is taking the next step in her career; eating, sleeping, seeing friends—even taking a breath—will have to wait. But just when she's about to get everything she has ever wanted, Samantha makes a mistake. A fifty-million-pound, career-destroying mistake. Unable to face the consequences, she does the unimaginable and runs away… Catching the first train she can, she finds herself in the countryside, outside a beautiful grand house.

Hannah has been running - literally and figuratively - from her life back in Australia. Whenever she's not working, she's pounding London's streets, putting the past behind her. Then she meets a fellow Australian named India, and Hannah's entranced. For India is confident, exotic and charming - qualities that Hannah feels she's desperately lacking. India has a secret, too - one beyond any remedy.

This rich and charming novel about a virtuous young woman's search for love amidst the fickle world of country gentry in Regency England is one of Jane Austen's most memorable works. Anne Elliot exists in a world where shallowness and hypocrisy present a challenge to her centered values and tender emotions. Anne vies for the affections of the man she loves while at the same time her willpower is threatened as she battles the conventions of a proper parochial society.

At 29, Claire is full of the joys of life - that is, until her husband leaves her on the day she gives birth to her baby. With a broken heart, a beautiful newly born and an expanding mirror image, she decides to visit her eccentric family in Dublin. There she starts to feel better. So much better, in fact, that James is in for a surprise when he decides to slither back into her life....

Stella Lane thinks math is the only thing that unites the universe. She comes up with algorithms to predict customer purchases - a job that has given her more money than she knows what to do with as well as way less experience in the dating department than the average 30-year-old. It doesn't help that she has Asperger's and that French kissing reminds her of a shark getting its teeth cleaned by pilot fish. She decides that she needs lots of practice - with a professional - which is why she hires escort Michael Phan.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Us Three written and read by Ruth Jones, co-creator of Gavin & Stacey and author of the smash-hit, number one bestselling debut, Never Greener. Friends forever is a difficult promise to keep... Meet Lana, Judith and Catrin. Best friends since primary...

Elfrida Phipps loves her new life in her pretty Hampshire village. She has a tiny cottage, her faithful dog, Horace, and the friendship of the neighbouring Blundells - particularly Oscar - to ensure that her days include companionship as well as independence. But an unforeseen tragedy upsets Elfrida's tranquillity: Oscar's wife and daughter are killed in a terrible car crash, and he finds himself homeless when his stepchildren claim their dead mother's inheritance.

Every table at Quentins Restaurant has a thousand stories to tell: tales of love, betrayal and revenge. Ella Brady wants to make a documentary about the renowned Dublin restaurant that has captured the spirit of a generation and a city in the years it has been open. In Maeve Binchy's magical Quentins you will meet new friends and old: the twins from Scarlet Feather, the Signora from Evening Class, Ria from Tara Road - and a host of fresh faces.

A young woman begs Sherlock Holmes to help find her missing fiancé, but the great detective makes an uncharacteristic mistake. Then Sherlock’s daughter, Lucy James, takes on a missing-person case of her own, but she must also keep a vicious criminal away from Becky, Lucy’s 10-year-old sister-in-law. Little Becky soon becomes dangerously involved in both cases. No one foresees the devastating news that Sherlock Holmes has been murdered.

Hidden in the depths of 18th-century London, a secret apothecary shop caters to an unusual kind of clientele. Women across the city whisper of a mysterious figure named Nella who sells well-disguised poisons to use against the oppressive men in their lives. But the apothecary’s fate is jeopardized when her newest patron, a precocious 12-year-old, makes a fatal mistake, sparking a string of consequences that echo through the centuries.

When Daryl Brackstone approaches private investigators Sebastian Clifford and Lucinda "Birdie" Bird about her mother's decades-old murder, she's hoping to finally uncover the truth. Her father died in prison for the crime, but Daryl has never believed in his guilt. As Seb and Birdie dig deeper, they discover Helen Brackstone wasn't just a suburban housewife—she was part of a secretive activist group investigating high-level corruption.

I've been waiting years for this moment. When Vivienne Campbell needs a housesitter, I make sure I'm the perfect candidate. Warm, friendly, highly recommended. Everything she's looking for. She has no idea who I really am. While she's away for the weekend, I have free rein of her perfect home, her perfect life. The life she doesn't deserve. Not after what she did. When she returns, I watch her confusion grow. Small incidents that make her question her own sanity. I'm there to comfort her, to be the friend she desperately needs.

Loch Ewe, 1940. When gamekeeper's daughter Flora's remote highland village finds itself the base for the Royal Navy's Arctic convoys, life in her close-knit community changes forever. In defiance of his disapproving father, the laird's son falls in love with Flora, and as tensions build in their disrupted home, any chance of their happiness seems doomed.

Sophie Whalen is a young Irish immigrant so desperate to get out of a New York tenement that she answers a mail-order bride ad and agrees to marry a man she knows nothing about. San Francisco widower Martin Hocking proves to be as aloof as he is mesmerizingly handsome. Sophie quickly develops deep affection for Kat, Martin's silent five-year-old daughter, but Martin's odd behavior leaves her with the uneasy feeling that something about her newfound situation isn't right.

A novel about connections in a changing world of friends, lovers, family, illness, and death, this unique narrative tells the story of Marie King - a 59-year-old divorcée from Sydney’s affluent north shore. Having devoted her rather conventional life to looking after her husband and three children, Marie is experiencing an identity crisis. Forced to sell the family home now that her children have moved out, Marie expresses herself by getting a tattoo and, consequently, forges a friendship with tattoo artist Rhys.