Rural School

With her phenomenally popular Miss Julia series, author Ann B. Ross has graced the New York Times and other best seller lists on her way to capturing the hearts of her many dedicated fans. Miss Julia, a graceful Southern lady with impeccable manners and a penchant for problem solving, has become a beloved heroine for countless admirers.

Retirement is bliss—or is it? Newly retired music teacher, Susan Wiles, puts her natural nosiness to work and discovers a talent for solving murders. In Murder is Elementary, Susan finds her former principal dead on the office floor, a half-eaten funfetti cupcake on the desk, and a list of suspects rivaling pre-pandemic lines at Disney! In book two, a dead body is discovered in a construction site behind a school. Susan puts her sleuthing skills into action to save her husband’s best friend, Tank, who is accused of the crime. While Susan works to solve this mystery and exonerate Tank, ...

Newly qualified teacher Tom Dwyer has been given his first post in Risingdale, a sleepy little village at the very top of the Yorkshire Dales. Unsure if he'll ever fit into this close-knit community, Tom joins a motley staff at the village school. With pupils who know more about sheep than they do arithmetic, Tom has his work cut out for him. Add to that an altercation with the beautiful but stand-offish Miss Janette Fairborn and an argument with the local squire's son, and Tom's first term proves a baptism of fire.

Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabo's books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution to which she soon finds herself consigned.

Under the Greenwood Tree is an affectionate and youthful portrait of a world Hardy knew well - village life in 'Wessex' - in which a romantic tale is set against changing circumstances. The traditional feature of local music making performed by the village band and choir is challenged by the modern innovation of organ and organist providing music in the church.

Jacqueline Keys was ostracized from her small hometown of Pine Springs, Texas, when she was 17, sent away because she was gay. Fifteen years later - long after she'd hitch-hiked to Los Angeles, put herself through college, and had written her first best seller - Jacqueline is persuaded to go back to the tiny town of Pine Springs after her father's death. The quick trip she'd envisioned for the funeral turns into weeks as she learns her father's business is suddenly hers to manage. And she is also again face-to-face with the woman who, as a teen, had been Jackie's first crush.

The Murders at Fleat House is the suspenseful and utterly compelling crime novel from the author of the multimillion-selling The Seven Sisters series, Lucinda Riley. Read by Gemma Whelan (The Woman Who Lied) 'A cleverly woven mystery to savour' – Sunday Express The sudden death of a pupil in...

Yankee transplant Daniel Musgrove can't seem to fit in at his Mississippi high school. When he meets fellow outsider Tim Cousins, things look up. But then the two boys' battles with a local bully escalate into a violent act that rocks the town.

In Brothers on Three, we follow Phil and Will, along with their teammates, coaches, and families, as they balance the pressures of adolescence, shoulder the dreams of their community, and chart their own individual courses for the future. Brothers on Three is not simply a story about high school basketball, about state championships and a winning team. It is a book about community, and it is about boys on the cusp of adulthood, finding their way through the intersecting worlds they inhabit and forging their own paths to personhood.

In the little village of Barton-in-the-Dale, long-hidden secrets are bubbling to the surface. Ashley Underwood and Emmet O'Malley are set to tie the knot, when a revelation from the handsome Irishman's past returns to haunt him. The town's resident nosey-parker discovers some juicy gossip about the primary school's dishy new staff-member and head teacher Elisabeth Stirling has a very special secret of her own.

They say the truth will set you free… but what if the truth ruins your life? Ellie Ryan is seventeen and determined to move to Nashville to pursue her dreams of making it as a songwriter, but an unexpected pregnancy shatters her plans and sets her on a course she never imagined. Shawn Klein has it all. The beautiful girlfriend. The scholarship to play football at Vanderbilt after he graduates high school. At eighteen, he leads worship at his father’s prosperous megachurch. His life is perfect. So why isn’t he happy? Everything changes when Shawn’s parents bring Ellie into their home...

A dead body, stolen jewelry, a barn full of secrets... not the vacation retired teacher Susan Wiles and her husband Mike expected when they decided to visit their old friends Emily and Henry Fox. Are the ominous events related to the true crime book Emily is writing? To the ten year anniversary of the unsolved disappearance of a local college student? Or to a builder's dream of creating a community of miniature homes at any cost? In a team effort, Susan, Mike, and their friends band together to restore harmony to the idyllic community of Sugarbury Falls, Vermont.

A feel-good story of unexpected second chances and hope. Birch Springs was supposed to be my past. But when my dad needs me, I walk away from my city life and come back to take care of him. What I don't see coming is Blake Donovan, my first love, living right across the street. Now he's a widower with a son. Before I know it, I’m sharing sweet moments with Blake and his son. Reconnecting stirs up feelings I thought I'd buried for good. Suddenly those old feelings are back, stronger than ever. Spending time with Blake feels like I’m exactly where I’m meant to be, but I wonder if ...

Cowboy Cody Colton was once Emma Jacobs’ unrequited high school crush but then she got a scholarship to NYU and bid goodbye to small town Texas and hello to big city lights. Now a children’s librarian, Emma is an urbanite through and through and she would rather have a root canal than camp in a tent, but when she finds herself hoodwinked into a Colorado whitewater rafting trip, she figures at least she’s a shoo-in to win the “summer-of-no-sex” celibacy wager she’s made with her three best friends. That is until she learns the lanky cowboy serving as their wilderness guide is ...

Under the Greenwood Tree, Hardy's second novel, was published in 1872 and became the first of his great series of Wessex novels. The book, subtitled A Rural Painting of the Dutch School, tells the endearing tale of a group of church musicians who accompany the hymns at the local Mellstock parish choir and we follow the fortunes of one of its member, Dick Dewy, who falls in love with the new school mistress, Fancy Day.

Fairacre is a village of cottages, a church and the school - and, at the heart of the school, its head mistress Miss Read. Through her discerning eye, we meet the villagers of Fairacre and see their trials and tribulations, from the irascible school cleaner Mrs Pringle, to the young school children, with their scraped knees, hopeful faces and inevitable mischief.

Now that Joy is back in Rocky Ridge, she’s hoping she’s made the right decision. Though life with her husband in LA had been turbulent, she’d at least had a job and a steady income. Now she’s got to rebuild from the ground up and jobs aren’t as plentiful in the small mountain town as they were in the city. Her daughter is depending on her, so this move to her home town has to work. Running into Joy was the last thing Aaron expected. She’d been his best friend and his biggest crush back in the day. They tried to date once. He’d been smitten and she’d decided that a guy with ...

Clare Rivers longs to understand the world, but first she must learn to understand herself ... Born in the 1960s on a UK apple farm, Clare Rivers is a girl out of time, living in a family and a world that makes little sense to her. Determined to carve out her place somehow, and with her deep love of her father to see her through, Clare begins a unique journey to discover the reasons for her own existence. If she can. However, accompanied by the oddities of family, school and the strange lyrical life of the apples, can Clare really find a place within herself to call home? This novel will ...

An exquisite new collection from a Pulitzer Prize-winning master of the short story, the culmination of a five-decade career: work that takes us beneath the placid surface of suburban life into the elusive strangeness of the everyday.

Love is in the air in the little village of Barton-in-the-Dale. Anyone can see that Ashley Underwood and Emmet O'Malley are made for each other. They've just got to admit it to themselves. But as the saying goes, the course of true love never did run smooth. While romance blossoms on one side of the village, an angry young boy struggles to believe in love. But when tragedy strikes, he learns that comfort and care can come from the most unexpected of places.