Showing results by publisher "Fourth Estate" in Small Town & Rural

James Acton has come to the village of Upton to begin again. As his grief over the death of his wife eases, he hopes to find new purpose as the vicar of this small Hampshire parish, still emerging from the long shadow of the war. James’ own war was in the Western Desert, where he fell in love, first with the thrill of being a hurricane pilot and then with Yvette Haddad, the captivating, enigmatic young Alexandrian with a penchant for dangerous driving.

Mercy is hard in a place like this. I wished him dead before I ever saw his face.... In a place like Odessa, Texas choosing who to trust can be a dangerous game. Mary Rose Whitehead isn’t looking for trouble – but when it shows up at her front door, she finds she can’t turn away. Corinne Shepherd, newly widowed, wants nothing more than to mind her own business, and for everyone else to mind theirs. But when the town she has spent years rebelling against closes ranks she realises she is going to have to take a side.

A young woman’s struggle to save her family and her soul during the most extraordinary year of 1666, when plague suddenly visited a small Derbyshire village and the villagers, inspired by a charismatic preacher, elected to quarantine themselves to limit the contagion.

Dove Connolly is dead. That’s not good for anyone in Tullyanna, never mind Dove. Now his best friend, Sharkey, is home asking awkward questions about Dove’s death, about the strange graphic novel he left behind and, most of all, about Sandra. Sandra Mohan. Missing now for more than a decade, whereabouts unknown. This, however, is a town dead-set on keeping its secrets. And Sharkey is already drawing attention from all the wrong quarters.

Marguerite Demers is 24 when she leaves Paris for the sleepy southern village of Saint-Sulpice, to take up a job as a live-in nurse. Her charge is Jerome Lanvier, once one of the most powerful men in the village, and now dying alone in his large and secluded house, surrounded by rambling gardens. Manipulative and tyrannical, Jerome has scared away all his previous nurses.

Jane easily falls in love with Duncan: he's charming, good-natured and handsome. He has also slept with nearly every woman in Boyne City, Michigan. Jane sees Duncan's old girlfriends everywhere - at restaurants, at the grocery store, even three towns away. While she may be able to come to terms with dating the world's most prolific seducer of women, she wishes she didn't have to share him quite so widely.

A creature of routine and decorum, Mrs March lives an exquisitely controlled existence on the Upper East Side. Every morning begins the same way, with a visit to her favourite patisserie to buy a loaf of olive bread, but her latest trip proves to be her last when she suffers an indignity from which she may never recover: an assumption by the shopkeeper that the protagonist in George March’s new book - a pathetic sex worker, more a figure of derision than desire - is based on Mrs March.

Merryn grew up on the wilds of Bodmin moor, raised by her mother and her aunt in an old farmhouse. Here, the locals never leave the village, fear for the future of their farms and cling desperately to the folkloric tales that are woven into their history. Except Merryn, who has escaped to Manchester for university, briefly untethering herself from her past. When Merryn returns home for the memorial service of her ex-girlfriend Claud, she finds her childhood home stranger and more secretive than ever. She’s sure that her mother is hiding something.

Knowing that he will soon die, Albert 'Poppy' Gondiwindi has one final task he must fulfill. A member of the indigenous Wiradjuri tribe, he has spent his adult life in Prosperous House and the town of Massacre Plains, a small enclave on the banks of the Murrumby River. Before he takes his last breath, Poppy is determined to pass on the language of his people, the traditions of his ancestors and everything that was ever remembered by those who came before him. The land itself aids him; he finds the words on the wind.

Dylan Read, the legendary country pop star, has spent fifteen years learning to craft the perfect good girl image. But Dylan is privately haunted by the loss of her best friend Kelsey, who went missing the year before Dylan’s meteoric rise to fame. When Kelsey’s body is found at the bottom of a New England lake where they grew up, Dylan is drawn back to her hometown where she must revisit their ill-fated teenage friendship and reckon with secrets that have stayed hidden for decades…

In August, eight friends gather at a house in the Cambridgeshire countryside for a week-long artists retreat. There is painting by the pool or writing in the shady corners of the garden and inside the spectacular 18th-century home. In the evenings, there are communal drinks, dinner outdoors, midnight swimming, games. But someone is playing a game the others don't understand, meddling with their work and appearing to lurk on the edges of the retreat. As tensions rise over the seven days, desire and deceit rise to the surface and all their lives will change forever.

Set in 1950s America at a time when people stopped looking west and started looking up: a breathtakingly beautiful debut novel of revolution, chance and the gambles we take with the human heart. Muriel, newly married and newly orphaned, works as a waitress in a San Diego diner. As she pours coffee and empties ashtrays, she eavesdrops on her customers, the ex-jockeys and trainers of the Del Mar racetrack. When she begins, secretly, to bet on the horses and, shockingly, to win, she feels strangely unready to share her good luck and its origins with her husband, Lee.

When 72-year-old Cloris Waldrip finds herself lost and alone in the unforgiving wilderness of the Montana mountains, it seems her chances of ever getting home to Texas are slim. Debra Lewis, a park ranger who is drinking her way out of the aftermath of a messy divorce, is the only one who believes the old lady may still be alive. Suspenseful, wry and gorgeously written, it is the inspiring account of two unforgettable characters whose heroism reminds us that survival is only the beginning.

When 72-year-old Cloris Waldrip finds herself lost and alone in the unforgiving wilderness of the Montana mountains, with only a Bible, a sturdy pair of boots and a couple of candies to keep her alive, it seems her chances of ever getting home to Texas are slim. Debra Lewis, a park ranger who is drinking her way out of the aftermath of a messy divorce, is the only one who believes the old lady may still be alive. Galvanised by her newfound mission to find her, Lewis leads a motley group of rescuers to follow the trail of clues that Cloris has left behind.