Showing results by publisher "Hodder & Stoughton" in Contemporary

Phoebe Baker has two passions in life: vintage dresses, and her French Bulldog, Coco Chanel. As the fierce and sassy manager of The Vintage Dress Shop, it's not only her job, but her calling to make sure everyone leaves her shop with their dream outfit. She doesn't need anyone or anything when she's in her frock heaven. When an incident between Phoebe and a customer goes viral and risks damaging the reputation of the shop, Phoebe's job is suddenly on the line.

When Ava's flatmate challenges her to make a new friend, Finn happens to be in the right place at the right time. In exchange for his friendship, Finn persuades Ava to work through his London summer bucket list before he leaves the city for good. With every passing day, their fake friendship turns into something more. But the problem with summer is that it always ends.

Cressida Collins is the queen of makeovers. With a well-placed stitch, button or seam, she can transform any frock in The Vintage Dress Shop and give customers their Cinderella moment. Like her beautifully organised workroom under the eaves, Cress's life away from the shop is just as orderly and mapped out. But when her boyfriend of fifteen years drops a bombshell, it explodes all the carefully laid plans Cress had for her future. It's going to take more than needle and thread to put Cress's own life back together. Will she ever be brave enough to say goodbye to her old dreams and start over?

Kathy Courage has never visited the famous Italian city of Florence before, so she's thrilled when she and her boyfriend, Neil, are invited there for a wedding. Unfortunately, with Neil's constant complaining and his teenage children in tow, it's not exactly the romantic break Kathy was hoping for. But when a mix-up with her flights leaves Kathy stranded in the city, she decides to embrace the unexpected and stay on alone.

Joel is afraid of the future. Since he was a child he's been haunted by dreams about the people he loves. Visions of what's going to happen - the good and the bad. And the only way to prevent them is to never let anyone close to him again. Callie can't let go of the past. Since her best friend died, Callie's been lost. She knows she needs to be more spontaneous and live a bigger life. She just doesn't know how to find a way back to the person who used to have those dreams. Joel and Callie both need a reason to start living for today....

It's time for Max and Dylan's book. An opposites-attract, forced-proximity holiday romance.

The convention of a book synopsis is fundamentally ridiculous. How can I adequately convey in only 150 words the complexity and bewilderment of the past 10 months and the effect the events that occurred have had on my perfectly regulated existence? One would need much longer to record in detail how I was blackmailed into demonstrating the efficacy of my soulmate programme and forced to participate in a series of ridiculous dates. How my life has been forever altered as a consequence.

Two couples. One reckless night. In the time they've known each other, Sally, Al and Mike have shared - well, almost everything. Sally and Al have been married for seven years, though now their relationship is hanging by a thread. Sally and Mike have been best friends since university. And on many occasions something more. Mike and Al have been friends and colleagues for many years. Yet with Al poised to become Mike's boss, their friendship comes under threat. And now there's Mike and Faye. They haven't been together long, but Mike's pretty sure that this time it's the real deal.

Dani Parker had grand plans for her life - but that was 22 years ago. Now she's a single mother still living in the quaint seaside town of Newbay, still working at the hotel where she got her first ever job. When she bumps into ex-boyfriend Nat, Dani wonders if this might be the start of something not-quite-new. But that's before she meets his fiancée....

Helen and Ben parted as heartbroken 18-year-olds and went their very separate ways. Twenty years later, mother-of-two-teenagers Helen is still in Manchester, a part-time primary teacher, stunned by the behaviour of her love-rat husband. In an old T shirt and scruffy jeans, she feels at the lowest point in her life. And suddenly, impossibly, Ben is standing on her doorstep. Tired maybe, lonely even, but clearly still the world-famous, LA-based multi-millionaire rockstar he has become. Can you ever go back?

Single mum Jules lives next to a tennis club, but has no plans to play. Especially when her old school crush, handsome doctor Sam Delaney, returns from the USA thirty years after leaving and is now displaying a killer forehand in direct view of her bedroom window. Despite what she tells her personal trainer fiancé, Jules finds exercise as tedious in her 40s as she did as a teenager. But when she's hit by perimenopause and her 19-year-old daughter's solo trip around the world - she's in urgent need of a distraction and rashly agrees to join an amateur women's tennis team.

With four chart-topping albums, Lacey Logan is a superstar whose life no longer feels like her own, her every move photographed, videoed and dissected. Lacey skilfully governs her narrative throughout it all, an expert at showing fans and paparazzi only exactly what she wants them to see. But when she discovers her boyfriend is hiding some devastating secrets, she begins to lose her confidence, and her control over her own story. Then big shouldered baseball player Jimmy Hodges walks into the bar where she's venting to a friend.

Some of the stormy weather of the past few seasons seems to have finally lifted for the Quinns. Kevin is about to tie the knot with Isabelle, and there's hopeful news about Bart, who has been captured by enemy forces in Afghanistan. That doesn't mean there aren't a few dark clouds on the horizon as the family juggle health scares and love triangles. But if there's one holiday that brings the Quinn family together, it's Christmas. And this year promises to be a celebration unlike any other.

Father of two Joe Clarke is about seventy-eight per cent sure he's just had an affair. After all that is the hopelessly attractive office intern in bed next to him, isn't it? But then again if he did have an affair why can't he remember anything at all about the night in question? Mortified by his mistake Joe vows to be a better man, but when his adored wife Penny puts two and two together and leaves him, things start to take a turn for the decidedly strange.

Ready to spend a quiet Christmas with his nearest and dearest, Christopher has closed up shop in his bakery, he's wrapped up and packed up his presents, and he's found someone to stay in his flat over the festive period. Everything is under control. That is until the mysterious person he's rented his flat to turns out to be none other than...Nash Nadeau, an actor - and the star of all Christopher's favourite Christmas movies. In fact, he's the guy Christopher's been crushing on for the whole past year. Since last Christmas.

Everyone deserves to find that one person who's meant for them, don't they? Honest and wise, poignant and warm, this is completely absorbing storytelling for fans of Jojo Moyes and Marian Keyes. Vinnie is an ordinary man. Ellen is an ordinary woman. Ellen is unable to move on after a terrible accident that left her mentally and physically scarred. Taxi driver Vinnie is struggling to cope with bringing up two children on his own. Everyone deserves to find that one person who's meant for them, don't they?

Driven by money, power and success, Gabriel has worked ruthlessly to get to the very top of the banking game. He's not going to let the inconvenience of a terminal brain tumour get in his way. But the tumour has other ideas. As it grows, it appears to be doing strange things to Gabriel's personality. Whether he likes it or not, he seems to be becoming less selfish, less mercenary, less unlikeable. Once he could dismiss the rest of humanity as irrelevant. Now he's not so sure.

Beloved author Mary Stewart's long-lost novella, now available again for the first time in 40 years. In 1879 a wealthy young woman elopes with an impoverished fisherman, leaving her family, who live on the volcanic island of Lanzarote, distraught. In 1968, 23-year-old Perdita West, secretary to the famous author Cora Gresham, visits Lanzarote, the strangest and wildest of the Canary Isles, on a research trip. They meet Cora's estranged son, Mike, and fall in love with the unusual, beautiful little island.

The first novel in the heartwarming, countryside-set Hope Meadows series. Newly qualified vet Mandy Hope is leaving Leeds - and her boyfriend, Simon - to return to the Yorkshire village she grew up in, where she'll help out with animals of all shapes and sizes in her parents' surgery. But it's not all plain sailing: Mandy clashes with gruff local Jimmy Marsh, and some of the villagers won't accept a new vet. Meanwhile, Simon is determined that Mandy will rejoin him back in the city.

Liberty has never been a risk-taker. She loves the routine of her quiet life in the charming village of Willowbrook, with her Labrador, Charlie. But the arrival of a mysterious gift prompts Liberty to make some changes: starting with a daily challenge to say yes to everything for the month of December.... Fearless and independent, Alex could hardly be a less obvious fit for peaceful village life. But after an accident cuts short his promising motorcycling career, he finds himself in Willowbrook in search of new direction.