The right person could appear anytime, anywhere, in these two stories of finding love and creating family. Father''s Day Robin Masterson's little boy wants a dog more than anything in the world. And there just happens to be one right next door! But the friendly black Lab belongs to Cole Camden, the unfriendliest man in the neighborhood. Cole hasn't always been so solitary, so aloof, but life has dealt him some harsh blows. Robin actually understands and shares his heartache, and soon Robin and Cole are looking at each other in a whole new way. They can make each other whole, and make a family again. Same Time, Next Year With a broken engagement behind him, James Wilkens decides to celebrate New Year's Eve in Las Vegas...where he meets Summer Lawton. She's just suffered a painful betrayal, and James promises her that in a year, she'll be over it. To prove his point, he makes a date to meet her in Vegas at the same time a year...

Somewhere between a car accident and a divorce, Annie Applegate stopped believing in happy endings... ...Now, she just wants to disappear. And the tiny town of Promise fits the bill. With its winding streets and melting-pot of residents, it's the perfect place for Annie to hide away and open the bookshop she always dreamed of owning. Until her new-found peace and quiet is disturbed by Lucas, a widower who rivals Annie as the most cynical person in town. With his troubled past and precocious children, Lucas is the last person she should be getting involved with. But when he asks for her help, Annie comes to realise that, maybe, going it alone isn't the solution after all... Readers LOVE The Little Bookshop of Promises: 'An emotional, heartwarming and romantic story that will make you feel more optimistic about the world!' 'Love this book! Would recommend any of her books!' 'This book is the best I've read in a long, long time ... I was hooked'

A snowstorm threatens to ruin Christmas for two mismatched strangers traveling together—until a spark of romance brightens the season in this charming short novel from Debbie Macomber. Shelly Griffin is looking forward to spending time with her beloved father in Seattle for the holidays. But unexpected complications arise when her plane from San Francisco is rerouted to Portland due to inclement weather. To make matters worse, Shelly finds herself stuck sharing the last available rental car with one of her fellow passengers: handsome, uptight businessman Slade Garner. Sure, he's attractive, but Shelly isn't immediately convinced she likes Slade. She's not expecting the arduous journey to her father's house in a severe blizzard to change her mind, either. But the more time Shelly spends with Slade, the more she suspects that she may have received an unexpected gift this Christmas: love.

A single mother makes an unexpected match with a total stranger in this uplifting novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber. Dianne Williams needs a man . . . but only for a night. The night of the Port Blossom Community Center’s Valentine’s dinner, to be precise. As the dinner approaches, she grows more and more exasperated by her children’s relentless efforts to set her up on a blind date. But one day, when a kind stranger helps her with car troubles, Dianne decides to take matters into her own hands. Steve Creighton fits the bill perfectly: He’s handsome, he’s charming, and he owns a decent suit. When Dianne asks him to accompany her to a Valentine’s dinner after only just having met him, he can’t help but find the offer amusing. As he and Dianne grow closer, however, his feelings for her only intensify—and, to Dianne’s surprise, so do hers.

A young woman finds herself torn between two very different men in this warm, compassionate novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber. Abby Carpenter longs for the type of romance she reads about in books. She loves her volunteer work teaching English as a second language, and has found her relationship with her boyfriend, Logan, just as fulfilling. But lately, she's thinking she needs a little spice in her life. Then she meets Tate, a handsome stranger, after a lesson in the park. Everything about him seems too good to be true, and he's infatuated with Abby—but she can't help assuming there's got to be a catch. Tate just might provide the sense of adventure Abby has been searching for. But when Logan, always steadfast in his commitment, gives her an ultimatum, Abby must choose: Who will make her happier? And is falling in love worth the risk?

Welcome to the Woodfield Movie Palace. The night the Titanic sank, it opened for business...and its builder died in his chair. In the 1950s, there was a fire; a balcony full of people burned to death. And years later, when it became the scene of one of Harmony, Indiana's most notorious murders, it closed for good. Abandoned, sealed, locked up tight...until now. Tonight, Professor Geoffrey Burke and his Parapsychology students have come to the Woodfield in search of evidence, hoping to find irrefutable proof of a haunting. Instead, they will discover that, in this theater, the terrors are not confined to the screen.

This season, discover the magic of two classic heartwarming stories and the message of love and giving at Christmas!Christmas LettersKatherine O'Connor spends her days at a cozy café writing Christmas letters for other people. She's good at making their everyday lives sound more interesting. But for renowned child psychologist Dr. Wynn Jeffries, who also frequents the café, Christmas means deception. Katherine argues with Wynn about his theories while he argues that her letters are nothing but lies. They disagree about practically everything—but as the days move closer to Christmas, Katherine and Wynn may find that love means accepting your differences while discovering what you share.Call Me Mrs. MiracleFor Jake Finley, owner of Finley's department store in New York City, Christmas means only one thing to him: profit. The holiday was destroyed for him by a tragedy years before. But now he needs a...

Discover again this classic romance story from #1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber, where a marriage of convenience is just the beginning... Originally published as Groom Wanted. Julia Conrad needs Russian biochemist Aleksandr Berinski to stay with her. Her Seattle company depends on his research, but his visa to the United States is about to expire. So Julia suggests he get married—to her. For business reasons only. Except Alek will only say "I do" if the marriage is real, and Julia wants to keep her heart safe. Can she trust Alek when love didn't come first?

Reproduced as graphics that preface narrative sections, the postcards in this novel -- communications between the Blood family and their son Loyal, as well as other personal mail and advertising material -- progressively reveal the insecurity of the rural Bloods in the changing post-war world. Loyal has fled into exile after an accidental killing, but cannot find a haven of rest. The family patriarch, Mink, writes vitriolic letters to local agricultural agents when the real object of his ire is his absent son. Loyal's brother sends off for an artificial arm to replace the one he lost in an accident; his sister answers a mail order ad for a husband. Through the mail, Proulx inventively reveals the inchoate longings of a difficult existence in this winner of the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award.

Available in one book for the first time: A Friend or Two and Reflections of Yesterday, two of Debbie Macomber’s classic novels that explore the power of hope and forgivenessA Friend or Two: Elizabeth Wainwright, an East Coast heiress, moves to San Francisco and takes a job at a Fisherman’s Wharf café, eager to live a simpler life and separate herself from her wealthy background. There, she meets Andrew Breed, a handsome, mysterious, and charismatic customer who claims to be a longshoreman. As she gets to know him, however, Breed’s words and actions don’t quite add up—is Elizabeth falling in love with someone who’s pretending to be something he’s not? Reflections of Yesterday: Twelve years have passed since Angie Robinson fled her hometown of Groves Point, South Carolina, with ten thousand dollars and a broken heart. She knows Simon Canfield still lives there. His...

Bird Cloud is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen. Proulx's first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years, Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house—with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region—inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Indians— and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers. Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time. Bird Cloud is magnificent.

Generations struggle in the American frontier West. "Every ranch...had lost a boy," thinks Dakotah Hicks as she drives through "the hammered red landscape" of Wyoming, "boys smiling, sure in their risks, healthy, tipped out of the current of life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo smashups, bad horses, deep irrigation ditches, high trestles, tractor rollovers and 'unloaded' guns. Her boy, too...The trip along this road was a roll call of grief."

The stories in Annie Proulx's new collection are peopled by characters who struggle with circumstances beyond their control in a kind of rural noir half-light. Trouble comes at them from unexpected angles, and they will themselves through it, hardheaded and resourceful. Bound by the land and by custom, they inhabit worlds that are often isolated, dangerous, and in Proulx's bold prose, stunningly vivid. In "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?" rancher Gilbert Wolfscale, alienated from his sons, bewildered by his criminal ex-wife, gets shoved down his throat the fact that the old-style ranch life has gone. Several stories concern the eccentric denizens of Elk Tooth, a tiny hamlet where life revolves around three bars. Elk Toothers enter beard-growing contests, scrape together a living hauling hay, catch poachers in unorthodox ways. "Man Crawling out of Trees" is about urban newcomers from the east and their discovery, too late, that one of them has violated the deepest ethics of the place. Above all, these stories are about the compelling lives of rapidly disappearing rural Americans. Through Proulx's knowledge of the history of Wyoming and the west, her interest in landscape and place, and her sympathy for the sheer will it takes to survive, we see the seared heart of the tough people who live in the emptiest state. Proulx, winner of the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and many other prizes, has written a collection of spectacularly satisfying stories.