Five-year-old Abby is losing her battle with leukemia. Her only hope is a newly developed treatment her mother, Celeste, can’t afford, and their insurance won’t cover.

After escaping a brief, abusive marriage to a drug dealer, Celeste Barr vowed never to marry again. With Abby’s life hanging in the balance, she signs up for the therapy, trusting that God will make a way.

Still grieving the wife he lost to cancer, Hunter Harrington believes his dreams of family died with her, until he meets Celeste and Abby. Out of a growing conviction that God has brought them into each other’s lives for a reason, he offers an extraordinary solution: marry him, and Abby will qualify immediately for the coverage she desperately needs.

As hope begins to replace despair, a marriage born of necessity slowly unfolds into love. But danger closes in. Celeste’s violent ex-husband is watching, and his return threatens everything they’ve begun to build.

Can their faith, trust, and growing love protect the family they’ve become—for the love of a child?

The post For the Love of a Child first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

James Beard Award–winning author Michael Ruhlman delivers a father-son road-trip story about grief, second chances, and discovering that home might not be a place you left behind—but a person you’re just getting to know, one meal at a time.

Junior year was supposed to be Miles’s escape plan—survive one year in Cleveland with Jake, the dad he barely knows, then get back to his real life in New York.

But that was before he got suspended. Before his mom died and left a hole nothing can fill. Before Jake’s art house theater started facing closure—and before Jake dragged him on a half-baked quest across Spain to track down a film director who may or may not want to be found.

Between wrong turns and cryptic clues through Madrid, Toledo, and Seville, they find themselves at wobbly tables in tapas bars, sharing plates of jamon and squid, talking in ways they never have before. Something unexpected happens over bocadillos and café con leche: Miles stops seeing Jake as the dad who left, and starts seeing him as the person who stayed.

Story Locale: Cleveland to Spain (Madrid, Toledo, Granada, Cordoba, Seville, Cadiz, Gibraltar, and more)

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Abandoned by her mother in New York, sixteen-year-old Geraldine falls under the influence of three women, each seeking to form her in their image, in this “wildly perceptive” (Stefan Merrill Block, New York Times bestselling author of Homeschooled) coming-of-age story from the bestselling author of Alice Sadie Celine.

For Gerry, growing up on the road has always been her mother and her, locked in dysfunction. Homeschooled, she hasn’t learned much math. Instead, her mother has taught her how to spend the day at a motel’s swimming pool without being a guest and how to dodge paying extra for the chicken on a Caesar salad.

Gerry learns how to pass and adapt, but when she is abandoned in the city, she finds herself in the care of three very different women, each intent on shaping her into competing and incompatible selves. First, there is her mother’s old college friend Bonnie, who lives in a world of country clubs and chintzy domesticity. Then there is Nell, her mother’s estranged sister and a successful artist, who insists on ambition and self-invention. And finally Finley, an old-money socialite, who ushers Gerry into a rarefied world of Manhattan privilege.

A coming-of-age story that explores unconventional forms of motherhood and caretaking, Heavy Cream is both a charming comedy of manners and a deeply probing look at the complexities of love, mental illness, and inheritance, and one young woman’s eccentric path to self-hood.

The post Heavy Cream first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

Not all abuse leaves bruises. Not all prisons have bars.

Wendi Burkham lives in an emotional prison she unwittingly walked into. Nobody understands, and her captor holds the keys.

Married to a respected pastor, Wendi lives a life others admire–with two children and a home that reflects faith, stability, and love. But behind closed doors, Wendi is trapped in a cycle of control, manipulation, and emotional abuse no one else can see–and no one would believe.

How do you escape when no one thinks you need to?

For sixteen years, she has stayed silent. Stayed faithful. Stayed afraid. Until one night forces her to choose between the life she has built . . . and the truth she can no longer ignore.

Her husband’s warning echoes: “Planting wind only reaps a harvest of tornadoes.”

But what if the storm is the only way out?

This powerful novel exposes the reality of emotional abuse—and the courage it takes to break free.

The post House of Wind first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

From the multi-award-winning author of An American Immigrant comes the story of a woman walking through paralyzing grief and the unlikely friendship that might unlock a path to healing.

Leaving behind the only city she’s known, Sandra and her family move from New York City to East Nashville for her husband’s job and a fresh start. She’ll miss her family and thriving career, but she is desperate to leave behind the city that holds her greatest loss.

And yet even with moving into a new home she designed and having the freedom to be a stay-at-home mom for the first time, her new life in Nashville is not what she thought it would be. She quickly realizes grief still follows her, and no new place can fix it.

When she meets her next-door neighbor Mark—an elderly, widowed, retired Pastor—an unlikely friendship quickly forms. His humor, spiritual wisdom, and affinity for gardening—a skill he was forced to learn when his late wife passed—brings a welcome distraction from Sandra’s suffocating grief, giving her hope for the first time since her tragic loss. Will this friendship be just what Sandra needs to heal her broken heart? Or will more unexpected news leave Sandra with even more heartache?

Story Locale: East Nashville, TN

The post Where Wilted Flowers Bloom first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

A wickedly funny office comedy about one bookseller’s (occasionally) ludicrous attempts to understand her manager while against all odds clinging to her passion for books—the perfect read for anyone who has felt that they can’t even… with the idiots among us.

Kyoko Tanihara loves books. Just about. But life at the Musashino Bookshop is starting to get her down. Instead of promoting her favorite stories, she finds herself distracted, tearing her hair out at the mere sight of her infuriating manager Takeru Yamamoto who can’t seem to do anything but get in her way of success.

From Yamamoto’s useless obsession with self-helps books to his cringey remarks on the hottest author in town, everything about Yamamoto seems designed to set Kyoko off. All that amid her struggle to make a name for herself in the publishing world, it’s tough for her to keep her love of literature pure and alive.

Until one day she is handed a book that speaks to all her frustrations, and opens her eyes to a whole new reality. What if there’s actually more to her manager’s obnoxious antics? What if, just maybe, her manager isn’t so stupid after all?

Story Locale: Japan

The post How Can My Manager Be So Stupid? first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

3 Little Blue Envelopes meets Love and Gelato in this YA coming-of-age romance about Emily, who takes a gap year in Europe to learn about life, love, and working through grief—while following in her grandmother’s footsteps.

Everything in Emily Tannenbaum’s life is going according to plan. Graduate high school as valedictorian? Check. Gain admission to Dartmouth? Check. Decide to pause everything to embark on a gap year adventure abroad? Wait, what?

Ever since her sister died, Emily has done everything in her power to be the good girl, the safe girl, the one her parents don’t have to worry about. She’s worked hard, she’s studied, she’s attended school-approved functions.

But when her grandmother, a former member of the famous Flower Sisters music duo, proposes that Emily take time off to follow the European tour the Flower Sisters took in 1966, Emily impulsively jumps at the chance as a way to embrace the messy and unexpected parts of life.

As she travels from Spain to Sweden with stops in Paris and Rome along the way, Emily begins to experience all that life has to offer. She deals with pickpockets, dances the night away, has her heart broken, and learns more about herself and where she came from than she ever could have imagined.

Story Locale: Europe (Specifically Madrid, Seville, Barcelona, Sweden, Paris, Nice, Venice, Florence, and Rome)

The post The Introvert’s Guide to Kissing in Europe first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

The Big Chill meets Groundhog Day when four estranged friends reunite for a funeral—only to find themselves reliving the same storm-lashed Saturday again and again.

When Babe—the complicated, magnetic matriarch of their teenage summers—dies, four estranged friends return to sleepy Mercy Island, a storm swept stretch of coastal Georgia, summoned by the reading of her will.

Didion arrives at the timeworn pink house to find the friends she never thought she’d see again—along with
the tensions, attractions, and unfinished business that once bound them together and broke them apart.

What should be a brief weekend of small talk quickly unravels when they wake up and discover . . . it’s Saturday. Again. And again. And again.

Trapped in a time loop with no end and no instructions, they’re forced to confront the betrayals, breakups, and buried truths that shattered them all those years ago. Because maybe, just maybe, an endless weekend is exactly what they all need to save their own lives.

The post Destination Funeral first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

A group of life-long friends. A secretive MLM cosmetics company. Some opportunities cost more than they’re worth.

Delilah Thomas has a stellar track record of avoiding conflict. Her life mantra? Keep the peace. Born to a family she has never fit in, Delilah learned early that no matter what it costs her, it’s best to keep quiet, nod, and agree. Now in her late thirties, she has mastered the art and employs it daily with the preschoolers she teaches.

Then Peach Pit sets up shop in her small hometown and infiltrates every female relationship, including Delilah’s lifelong best-friend group. A direct sales business, Peach Pit claims its beauty products are organic and all-natural and recruits women to become “Darlings” who host parties to sell products to friends and family. Delilah’s friend Betsy is ecstatic to join, drawn by promises of sisterhood and easy income. But something seems off to Delilah.

When customers, including her pregnant friend Eliza, start reporting rashes, Peach Pit refuses to take responsibility. Then Betsy lets an unsettling secret slip, and Delilah can’t hold her tongue any longer. With the help of her retired neighbor, Mrs. Chopra, and travel journalist Jasper–Delilah’s longtime pen pal and childhood crush, finally in town for a visit–Delilah investigates the company and uncovers the grim truth. She is faced with a choice: Stop pushing and keep the peace, or find her courage and expose Peach Pit’s shady business practices, even if it costs her the unthinkable.

A story about enduring friendship, Pretty as a Peach paints a vivid portrait of choosing bravery in the midst of uncertainty and reminds us that the sweetest things in life are worth fighting for. 

The post Pretty as a Peach first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

Set in a single sweltering summer, the story of two traumatized teenagers picking up the pieces of their lives in the wreckage of a bizarre gothic mansion.

Seventeen-year-old Leo Arceneaux has been raised by his mother and uncle, having lost his father in a shockingly random murder when he was two. Connor Rigby is the teenage daughter of a wealthy lifestyle influencer. She has no idea who her father is. As summer begins, Leo and Connor both find themselves in a small town in rural Minnesota, living in the rundown grandiosity of Connor’s mother’s family’s estate. Rigby Mansion is a secluded gothic monstrosity that Connor’s mother is slowly renovating without ever actually being present. Leo is there as a summer landscaping laborer, working to pay off a debt to his mother and uncle, and Connor arrives shortly after, having left behind wreckage of her own and looking for a place to lie low away from her mother.

Connor and Leo soon find themselves in an unfamiliar but intense relationship—not simply a summer romance but something that feels important and somehow tied to the combination of this particular blazing-hot summer and this weird house in the middle of nowhere.

When an accident on the estate’s grounds reveals the bones of two long dead people, Leo and Connor become obsessed with the couple buried beneath the fountain. Neither of them can say exactly why, but they’re sure that somehow these two corpses are tied to the to whatever comes next in their lives.

The post Summerwork first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.