Saturdays at the Café

Saturdays at the Café is a weekly feature hosted here to talk about and discuss the books I’ve discovered during the past week, added to my shelf and am excited about reading. They may be new/scheduled releases I’ve seen on NetGalley, at the library, or from publishers or they may be older titles my friends have reviewed and shared on Goodreads or blogs.

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A man and a woman with the same name are looking for a fresh start only to discover they have landed the same job in this charming new romance by bestselling author Beth O’Leary.

Charlie couldn’t be happier to take the job of farm-shop manager on the remote, wild Isle of Ormer. She’s grieving, a little lost, and in desperate need of a fresh start.

Jones has come out of a difficult breakup and is looking forward to some peace away from the noise of his city life. Moving to Ormer couldn’t have come at a better time.

But when Charlie Jones and, ahem, Charlie Jones both turn up at Ormer’s one and only farm shop, claiming to have been offered the role of manager, everyone is baffled. How could this have happened? And just who is the real Charlie Jones?

I learned about this upcoming April release from a Goodreads friend. It’s a library audiobook hopeful.

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Time is running out for a writer with a shocking story to tell in a gripping novel of redemption, revelation, and long-buried secrets by New York Times bestselling author A. R. Torre.

Romance novelist Helena Ross once had everything—success, a family, a future. Then tragedy hit, leaving her isolated in a silent house. Now she spends her days alone, still churning out blockbuster love stories while avoiding the memories that destroyed her happily ever after.

When Helena is diagnosed with an aggressive illness, she realizes that the only story left to tell is her own. Desperate to finish her book before it’s too late, Helena agrees to work with an unlikely bestselling author Marka Vantly, her biggest critic and someone who is also guarding career-ending secrets.

As the two authors work to reconstruct the day Helena lost everything, they learn that sometimes the truth is the most devastating ending of all.

Revised. This edition of The Ghostwriter includes editorial revisions.

This was originally released in 2017 and is being republished with revisions. I received the audiobook for review. 

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From the USA TODAY bestselling author of “absolute romantic perfection” (Christina Lauren), a clever and heartwarming rom-com that is perfect for fans of Ali Hazelwood and Kate Clayborn about two best friends who must fake a relationship for their exes.

Thea and Alex have three things in common—they love food, they hate where they live, and they’re both divorced. Otherwise, they couldn’t be more different.

Thea’s never cooked a day in her life. Alex is a world-class chef. Alex resents feeling stuck in his hometown. Thea resents the town for not feeling more like home. Thea and her ex are in a contentious custody battle for their dog. Alex and his ex amicably coparent their daughter. Beyond a few friends in common, a couple small-world connections (welcome to life in a mid-size city), their lives look nothing alike. Fast forward two years, and they’re truly the best of friends. No one would ever know their friendship began as a lie…

Two years ago, their exes got together immediately following their divorces, and somehow, Thea and Alex found themselves spinning a spite-fueled story about being old friends and first loves. Two years later, what began as a ruse has grown into real friendship—just friendship, despite what friends and family seem to think. But when their exes invite them on a two-week, “two family” beach vacation—daughter and dog included—Alex and Thea start to wonder if this story they’ve spun might have gotten away from them, and if it’s led them to the last place they ever thought it could: a happy ending.…

I received this for audio review.

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In this Civil War love story, inspired by a real-life friendship across enemy lines, the wife of a missing Confederate soldier discovers a wounded Yankee officer and must decide what she’s willing to risk for the life of a stranger, from the New York Times bestselling author of such acclaimed historical fiction as Hour of the Witch and The Sandcastle Girls.

Virginia, 1864—Libby Steadman’s husband has been away for so long that she can barely conjure his voice in her dreams. While she longs for him in the night, fearing him dead in a Union prison camp, her days are spent running a gristmill with her teenage niece, a hired hand, and his wife, all the grain they can produce requisitioned by the Confederate Army. It’s an uneasy life in the Shenandoah Valley, the territory frequently changing hands, control swinging back and forth like a pendulum between North and South, and Libby awakens every morning expecting to see her land a battlefield.

And then she finds a gravely injured Union officer left for dead in a neighbor’s house, the bones of his hand and leg shattered. Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the Vermont Brigade is her enemy—but he’s also a human being, and Libby must make a terrible decision: Does she leave him to die alone? Or does she risk treason and try to nurse him back to health? And if she succeeds, does she try to secretly bring him across Union lines, where she might negotiate a trade for news of her own husband?

A vivid and sweeping story of two people navigating the boundaries of love and humanity in a landscape of brutal violence, The Jackal’s Mistress is a heart-stopping new novel, based on a largely unknown piece of American history, from one of our greatest storytellers.

Thanks to Jamele @ Books With Jams for her great review. It’s a library audiobook hopeful.

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From the author of the acclaimed bestseller The Light Between Oceans comes a breathtaking and epic novel set in the vast outback of Australia—about tragedy, family secrets, and the enduring power of love.

When we do something that can’t be undone or mended, how do we go on living? How do we find our North Star when there is no right answer? These are the questions at the center of M. L. Stedman’s unforgettable and magisterial new novel, A Far-flung Life. From the author of the beloved and bestselling The Light Between Oceans, this is a sweeping and epic story of a family, a tragedy, and the aftermath that reverberates for decades.

Remote Western Australia, 1958: here, for generations, the MacBrides have lived on a vast sheep station, Meredith Downs. It is a million acres, an ocean of arid land. On an ordinary day, on a lonely road, under the unending blue sky, patriarch Phil MacBride swerves to avoid a kangaroo. In seconds the lives of the entire MacBride family are shattered. And then, tragedy revisits when a twist of consequences claims the life of one sibling, and leads another to give up everything for the sake of an innocent child. Matt, the youngest MacBride, is plunged into a moral and emotional journey for which there is no map, no guide. The secrets at the heart of this gutting and beautiful story force him to choose between love and duty, sacrifice and happiness.

A Far-flung Life is a tale about family and belonging, fate and time. It is about people trying to do their best, and each, for private reasons, seeking shelter from the storm of life.

Can a fleeting moment unravel a whole life, mar it indelibly and irrevocably? Can compassion, resilience and forgiveness allow us to come to terms with our human imperfections? These are the questions Stedman asks in A Far-flung Life, her profoundly moving, uplifting, and luminous new novel about what the heart can endure for the sake of love.

Thanks to Louis @ Book Me A Read for his excellent review. I received this for audio review.

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#1 New York Times bestselling author Sandra Brown delivers a new signature sexy suspense about a detective seeking justice for his murdered wife with the help of a psychotherapist … while fighting an undeniable attraction to her.

Two years ago, Detective Mitch Haskell lost his wife to a vicious act of retribution, and has since attributed her murder to two Roland Malone and the unidentified mastermind of the crime known only as Oz. Malone, a ruthless executioner and drug dealer who fronts as a restaurant owner, neutralizes so cleanly that he doesn’t leave a trace. And he performs his handiwork at the biddings of Oz, the faceless kingpin of a drug trafficking operation whose name alone evokes terror.

Obsessively vowing to avenge his late wife’s murder, Mitch has been on a downward spiral, jeopardizing his closest relationships and drinking excessively to numb his pain. After going one step too far, Detective John Bowie, his former best friend and now his boss, has forced Mitch to get therapy to sort himself out.

Dr. Dylan Reede is immediately empathetic to the pain she senses beneath Mitch’s cavalier attitude and wisecracking. She’s determined to make the most of his mandated sessions. But from the moment Mitch breezes into her office, Dylan finds it a struggle to maintain the professional and personal boundaries that keep her own tragic past at a safe distance.

As Mitch begins to close in on Oz and Malone’s operation, they’re prepared to stop him by any means necessary. And when it’s revealed that Dylan might hold the key to bringing them to justice, Mitch and Dylan’s irresistible attraction to each other may not only compromise both of them professionally, but place them in Oz’s bullseye.

I received the hardcover edition from the publisher but am hoping to get the audiobook for review.

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A breathtaking reimagining of Cinderella, as told through the eyes of its iconic “evil” stepmother, revealing a propulsive love story about the lengths a mother will go to for her children

A widow twice-over, Etheldreda is now saddled with the care of her two children, a priggish stepdaughter, and a razor-taloned peregrine falcon. Her entire life has become a ruse, just like the manor hall they live grand and ornate on the exterior, but crumbling, brick by brick, inside. Fierce in the face of her misfortune, Ethel clings to her family’s respectability, the lifeboat that will float her daughters straight into the secure banks of marriage.

When a royal ball offers the chance to secure the future she desperately desires, Etheldreda must risk her secrets, pride, and limited resources in pursuit of an invitation for her daughters—only to see her hopes fulfilled by the wrong one. As an engagement to the heir of the kingdom unfolds with unnerving speed, she discovers a sordid secret hidden in the depths of the royal family, forcing her to choose between the security she’s sought for years and the wellbeing of the feckless stepdaughter who has rebuffed her at every turn.

As if Bridgerton met Circe, and exhilarating to its core, Lady Tremaine reimagines the myth of the evil stepmother at the heart of the world’s most famous fairytale. It is a battle cry for a mother’s love for her daughters, and a celebration of women everywhere who make their own fortunes.

This is the March selection by Reese’s Book Club and I got intrigued. I’m in a short library queue for the audiobook.

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It’s 1977 and an air of restlessness has settled on the residents of Cambridge Road in Rochester, New York. When Nina Larkin is given a copy of The Joy of Sex by her newly divorced friend, she can no longer dismiss the nearly non-existent intimacy of her marriage. Just as her oldest child, Clara, is falling in love for the first time, Nina finds herself longing for the a midlife awakening. An intoxicating fling with a neighbour brings Nina a freedom she never thought possible—but also risks the reputations of both families and unravels Clara’s world, just as she stands on the threshold of adulthood.

Years later, Clara, now a successful food stylist in New York City, has never been able to move past the long-ago scandal. Drawn back home by the pull of a family wedding and wrestling with her own demons, she makes a pivotal decision that turns her life upside down.

Written with Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s signature humor and insight, LAKE EFFECT is a wise and probing look at love and desire, mothers and daughters, loss and grief, and what we owe the people we love most.

After reading the review by Larry @ Get Booked With Larry, I accepted this for audio review.

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The time is now.

New emotional and hopeful standalone novel by New York Times bestselling author S.L. Scott.

I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to smile, to laugh, and to really live. Until I met him.

Heart-stoppingly handsome.
Totally forbidden.
Keats Matthews looked at me like I was something special.

He was escaping his past. I wanted to escape my present. Together, we fell hard and fast and knew we had found forever. Or so we thought …

Six years later, his shoulders are broader than I remembered, his charming smile thaws my frozen heart, and it’s so tempting to run my fingers through his hair like I did years ago. But it’s the tenderness and warmth in his brown eyes that remind me of the forever we almost shared.

It’s magic when we’re together again. Our chemistry has only magnified. Seeing him, confident and more irresistible than ever, has me falling for him all over again and hoping for a second chance.

But he still believes our timing was off before. He’s wrong. It was the secret I kept hidden that was our undoing. Time hasn’t healed old wounds, and not everything hidden has come to light. When it does, we’ll stand together or fall apart. Either way, we must find out.

I was offered this for review and am hoping to receive the audiobook edition.

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From the bestselling author of What Lies in the Woods, No One Can Know, and A Killing Cold, a new novel about a search & rescue expert, a kidnapped woman, and the lost girls who haunt them both.

There is a girl in a basement.
The door has stopped opening.
The light is gone.

Stranger is trapped in the dark, with only her imagination and the scribbles on the wall left by long-dead girls to keep her company. Nearly out of food and water, she makes one last attempt to escape. But if the door opens at last, will it mean salvation, or only the beginning of her fight to survive?

Audrey is a search and rescue expert who never stopped looking for her ex-best friend, Janie, who disappeared when they were teenagers. Janie used to love the local legend of a forest witch who saves girls from bad men, but Audrey knows now that for every one saved, there’s always another one lost. When she stumbles upon evidence in the forest that a teenage runaway might have actually been kidnapped from land belonging to the town’s most prominent family, she will have to dig through decades of secrets to reveal the biggest one of all: what happened to the girls before.

After seeing so many great reviews by trusted friends, I grabbed the audiobook from the library.

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She wanted to write the perfect novel. Instead, she became the perfect villain.

Struggling romance writer and recent divorcée Marcy Jo Codburn feels like a failure. She’s green with author envy and longing for a book deal, a launch party with cupcakes, and the admiration of her daughter. But her dream of literary success is fading faster than her beige hair dye. When she witnesses celebrated author Francesca Barber in a compromising position, Marcy sees her chance. Transforming into Summer Branigan, her bolder, blonder pen name, she leverages Francesca’s secret to secure the ultimate coauthor.

As their collaboration spirals from Marcy’s modest Connecticut home to Francesca’s lavish Hamptons estate, both women discover that in the cutthroat world of publishing, every story has its price. With looming deadlines, a kidnapping plot gone awry, and more than one fraud to hide, their twisted partnership careens toward a surprise ending neither could have written.

In this darkly comic page-turner, critically acclaimed author Deborah Levison skewers the publishing industry with razor-sharp wit. A Novel Crime asks just how far an aspiring writer will go to see her name on a book jacket—and what happens when the stories we tell start to write themselves.

I accepted this for audio review after reading the great review by Krissy @ Books & Biceps.

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What books did YOU add to your shelves this week?