Showing titles in City Life

Piglet is judging the contents of your shopping trolley. She is listening to what you order for lunch and is observing whether the dessert you serve is homemade or snatched from a packet. There isn't another 31-year-old that takes food more seriously. And who could blame her, with a childhood nickname like that? In just over a fortnight, she is marrying Kit. Kit and his tasteful family present an opportunity for reinvention - when she had been growing up in Derby, this life, this man had been beyond her imagination.

When Rolling Stone journalist Kayla McCray is assigned a cover story on pop icon Lexi Mayhem, Kayla stumbles across a startling new angle to the exposé. Years ago, another rising star from Lexi’s past mysteriously leaped to her death. Some things are better off forgotten, Lexi says. Kayla disagrees. It’s 2005 and Ava Petrova moves to New York with a notebook full of songs and a dream. Then she meets Lexi, an up-and-coming singer who brands Ava with an enigmatic new stage name and introduces her to an intoxicating city alive with possibilities.

Here is the preface to 12 magnificent stories, originally part of The John Cheever Audio Collection, in which John Cheever celebrates - with unequaled grace and tenderness - the deepest feelings we have.

Pericles Drakos has lived in the exquisite Circle Building for all of his seventy-five years. From its lofty windows, he has seen his little corner of Istanbul shift and transform. But as the area has become increasingly gentrified, Pericles has retreated into its shadowy corners. And when the pandemic hits, his isolation deepens.

Beatrice Donovan would do anything for her identical twin sister. Including stepping into her hotel management job temporarily and pretending to be her - she’s desperate. What could go wrong? A lot apparently! Because her sister Delilah has hugely understated her role – the hotel is at risk of closure and she’s promised she can turn it around. Now Bea has to find a way to fly under the radar, get the job done before anyone notices their switch up. Sounds easy, all Bea has to do is avoid her temporary new boss Jonah. However, that’s a lot harder than she thought.

My night out with friends turned into a whirlwind romantic adventure with a stranger, Mr. Tattoo Muscle. Riding on the back of his motorcycle was exhilarating and completely out of my element. His enigmatic nature is intriguing, leaving me wanting him more and more. His deep, soulful eyes hold secrets, and I feel inexplicably connected to him. None of that was planned and neither was the positive pregnancy test. Shockingly, my baby daddy turned out to be one of my dad's most trusted employees, and he has the worst reputation when it comes to women. His rough exterior hints at a complicated ...

City Girl is a gripping street fiction novel that delves into the turbulent life of Rasha "Raz" Collins, a determined twenty-year-old woman living in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Annapolis. Rasha dreams of escaping her troubled community, and her middle school sweetheart, Monte, appears to be her ticket out.

A much older mafia beast kidnapped me. The only way out is to marry him. He’s the cold one, the brutal one. The one who handles the interrogations. When his men force me into his interrogation room, there is only one way to save myself. I have to marry the mafia beast. Even if it means giving him my virginity. I’ve been used as a pawn my whole life, but now I’m the heir to the family business. When he kidnaps and overpowers me, I know exactly what to expect. His reputation as a Bratva beast is widely known. A marriage pact with this savage is the last thing I want. But I have no ...

Landon's living alone in Tokyo as a British 'expat', Louie's visiting while he anxiously waits for approval on his US visa. Against the backdrop of a misty Tokyo Spring, their precious time together is spent wandering into side streets and coffee shops, sharing unmade beds and plates of food. But as the days tick by, Louie's expectations start to overtake reality and he falls too deeply for a life that's not yet his.

A newcomer to New York, Wyeth is a Black painter who grew up in the South and is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. It’s challenging. Gallery shows displaying bad art. Pretentious artists jockeying for attention. The gossip and the backstabbing. While his part-time work for an art restorer is engaging, Wyeth suffers from artist’s block with his painting and he is finding it increasingly difficult to spark his creativity.

Verity Lockwood despises life at Far View House, where her father and mill owner, Jebediah Lockwood, drowns his fortune—and his wits—in drink. With debts mounting, whispers spread—how much longer can Lockwood’s Mill survive? The dark and dirty mills of Yorkshire are no place for a gently bred young woman, but when Verity learns that her father’s ruin threatens not only her home but the livelihoods of the workers who depend on it, she refuses to stand idly by.

Thirtysomething Page was content with her life in New York City - until it went to the dogs. Unceremoniously dumped by her boyfriend of four years and fired from her art gallery job in the same week, she flees to Washington, DC, and moves in with her big brother. She hopes the new setting and familial comfort will help her finally find her bearings. What Page finds instead is an unlikely refuge: a park for the neighborhood’s poshest pooches, and a quirky pack of companionable dog-run regulars who become fast friends.

The Pelletiers are a prominent French family living in Beirut. The patriarch, Louis, has built a successful business that he hopes to pass on to his eldest son. With no head for management, Jean nearly runs the company into the ground, then marries a materialistic young woman who insists they emigrate to Paris and join high society. But there's another reason Jean must leave—he has committed a terrible crime.

On that day, he saved me and helped me land my dream job, then vanished heartlessly after getting me pregnant. Little did I know that he would become the catalyst for an unforeseen series of events. Now, four years later, he's the company's new owner and my new boss. I don't plan on telling him about our four-year-old daughter, but the weight of this secret burdens me with immense guilt. While his grumpy reputation precedes him, I've discovered a soft spot in his heart. He goes to great lengths to protect me and our daughter, not even knowing she's his. Despite the pain he caused me, there ...

In Hysteria, we meet a young woman an hour into yet another alcohol-fueled, masochistic, sexual bender at her local bar. There is a new bartender working this time, one she hasn't seen before, but who can properly make a drink. He looks familiar, and as she is consumed by shame from her behavior the previous week - hooking up with her parents' colleague and her roommate's brother - she also becomes convinced that her Brooklyn bartender is actually Sigmund Freud. They embark on a relationship, and she is forced to confront her past.

An explosive novel that exposes the magnetic pull of forbidden lust...when a wife takes a mistress. Two couples join for a weekend of escape from New York...a getaway that becomes a cauldron of boiling temptations that would ignite their long-buried desires and shatter their lives. It's the story of Leigh Whitman, a rich, married woman who has everything a woman could desire...and yet aches to indulge her repressed, compulsive desires, aroused now by Jennie Dunbar...a emotionally-torn woman trapped in a decomposing marriage and who now finds herself yearning for a different kind of touch, a...

When teenagers Jamal Deng and Aisha Saforo are shot dead on the edge of a notorious estate, DS Chris Ashcroft knows why he’s been assigned the case—and he doesn’t like it one bit. Refusing to write the murders off as gang violence, Ashcroft insists on digging deeper—something doesn’t add up. Jamal and Aisha came from different worlds. They had no reason to be together . . .

Kara Davis is a girl caught in the middle - of her Canadian nationality and her desire to be a “true” Jamaican, of her mother and grandmother’s rages and life lessons, of having to avoid being thought of as too “faas” or too “quiet” or too “bold” or too “soft”. In “Little Jamaica”, Toronto’s Eglinton West neighbourhood, Kara moves from girlhood to the threshold of adulthood, from elementary school to high school graduation, in these 12 interconnected stories.

I'm pregnant with my ex's brother's baby. The plan was to avoid anything related to my ex-boyfriend Jacob Cane by leaving my hometown of Braven Bay. But fate had other plans. I crossed paths with his older brother, Nate, in the Windy City. Nate is a former Marine and firefighter with forest green eyes and an incredible body. Nate is not only in the same city as me, he's also my neighbor. And... He doesn't like me. He holds animosity towards me from years earlier when fate first brought us together. It doesn’t stop the electricity we both feel. As we become closer, Jacob's sense of ...

Mistake #1: One scorching night with Jacob Walker, Chicago Blade's notorious playboy and my brother's best friend. Mistake #2: Agreeing to be his fake fiancé to save his career. Mistake #3: Falling for the man who doesn't know he's about to become our baby's daddy. Jacob has a body forged in steel and a smile that can melt the ice… he's every woman's fantasy. I'm the team's new strait-laced PR executive tasked with cleaning up his image... while hiding my growing secret. Whenever he holds me close for the cameras, it feels less like pretend.