For the Love of Austen

Charming and clever Emma Woodhouse is used to getting her way. She’s content living in her tight-knit Upper East Side neighbourhood, maintaining perfect grades at university and keeping an eye on her lonely father. And when her budding matchmaking hobby results in her sister’s marriage, she knows she’s on to something. If only George Knightley, her annoying neighbour and childhood friend, would get out of her way.

Beautiful, clever, and rich, Emma Woodhouse has lived twenty-three years in her tight-knit Upper East Side neighborhood with very little to distress or vex her…that is, until her budding matchmaking hobby results in her sister’s marriage—and subsequent move downtown. Now, with her sister gone and all her friends traveling abroad, Emma must start her final year of grad school grappling with an entirely new emotion: boredom. So when she meets Nadine, a wide-eyed Ohio transplant with a heart of gold and drugstore highlights to match, Emma not only sees a potential new friend but a new project.

Will Darcy is everything Lizzy Bennet is not. Aloof, arrogant…and rich. Of course, he’s never cared about money. In fact, it’s number one on his long list of things that irk him. Number two? His friend Charlie’s insistence on setting him up with his new girlfriend’s sharp-tongued sister. Lizzy Bennet is all wrong for him, from her money-hungry family to her uncanny ability to speak to him as bluntly as he does everyone else. But then maybe that’s why he can’t stop thinking about her.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged – well, by Elizabeth Bennet anyway – that there’s nothing worse than summer in the Hamptons. She should know, she’s lived there her whole life. Every summer, her hometown is inundated with rich New Yorkers who party ‘til dawn then disappear for the rest of the year. Not that Lizzy blames them – she’s anxious to leave too. But after putting her own dreams on hold to help her family, she’s still here, surfing the same beach every morning and waiting for something to change.