CARMEN REID - HOW NOT TO SHOP - 13TH AUGUST
Her passion is fashion…but she’s on a budget! Personal shopper Annie Valentine is about to hit the big time: presenting a glamorous TV makeover series! But too late, Annie discovers this is TV on a shoestring. They’re paying her buttons and her budget is zip.
Can she make do with Primark when all she wants is Prada? While Annie performs miracles with the minimum, boyfriend Ed is left at home with one son (deeply green), one daughter (deeply teen) and one sexy, Russian blonde (don’t ask). He’s not happy. He wants more together-time. He wants a dog.
He may even want…a baby! But could non-stop, fame-seeking Annie ever handle that?
ANNIE SANDERS - GETTING MAD, GETTING EVEN - 20TH AUGUST
Georgie and Flick are a girl’s best friend – and secret weapon. Their agency, Domestic Angels, provides invaluable help to armies of harassed women. After years of hard work, Georgie and Flick have built a small but grateful clientele – doing everything from booking the plumber to replacing dead hamsters.
Then one evening, they are visited by a pale, nervous-looking woman who makes the strangest request yet. Her husband has combined a take-over with a leg-over. Would Georgie and Flick help her get her own back?
It isn’t long before word gets out. Inundated with requests from angry wives, Georgie and Flick begin to wonder whether all these men are really as black as they are painted. Meanwhile, the disgruntled husband of a client has rumbled them. It may be that they aren’t the only masters of revenge after all…
SAM BAKER - THE STEP-MOTHERS SUPPORT GROUP - 20TH AUGUST
Eve has never imagined herself as a stepmother. But when she falls in love with Ian, he comes with a ready-made family of three children. And, to make matters worse, he’s a widower. The ghost of his glamorous and well known wife haunts them. Clare, a teacher and single mother, is Eve’s best friend.
She is the only person Eve can talk to about how to win round three hostile children. But despite Clare’s years of practice with her own teenage daughter, it’s her younger sister Chloe who provides the truly sympathetic ear. Mel is the high achiever, sent along to Eve’s so-called ’support group’ by a colleague.
Her new boyfriend has a ten-year-old daughter and she knows that if the relationship is going anywhere, she is going to have to meet her. And Mandy is the stay-at-home mum, whose relationship comes with stepchildren, and who wants more than anything to stitch together a new family life for herself and her kids. As a cup of coffee turns to a bottle of wine and the get-togethers become a regular fixture, the women share their love lives, their ambitions – and their feelings about their new families. But their friendship is tested when they are forced to confront new futures as well as unwelcome figures from the past!
JULIE BUXBAUM - AFTER YOU -25TH AUGUST
It happened on a tree-lined street in Notting Hill to a woman who seemed to have the perfect life. Ellie Lerner’s best friend, Lucy, was murdered in front of her young daughter. And, as best friends do, Ellie dropped everything—her marriage, her job, her life in the Boston suburbs—to travel to London and pick up the pieces of Lucy’s life. While Lucy’s husband, Greg, copes with his grief by retreating into himself, eight-year-old Sophie has simply stopped speaking.
Desperate to help Sophie, Ellie turns to a book that gave her comfort as a child, The Secret Garden. As the two spend hours exploring the novel’s winding passageways, its story of hurt, magic, and healing blooms around them. But so, too, do Lucy’s secrets—some big, some small—secrets Lucy kept hidden, even from her best friend. Over a summer in London, as Ellie peels back the layers of her friend’s life, she’s forced to confront her own as well: the marriage she left behind, the loss she’d hoped to escape. And suddenly Ellie’s carefully constructed existence is spinning out of control in a chain of events that will transform her life—and those around her— forever.
AMANDA HEARTY - POSITIVELY YOURS - 27TH AUGUST
Beth Prendergast has fallen hook, line and sinker for her boss. Tom Maloney is everything she wants in a man and they seem made for each other. But when Beth discovers that she is pregnant Tom makes it clear that a baby was never part of his plan. Is Beth really ready to take on motherhood all on her own?
Grace Miller’s life changed when she met and fell in love with American Ethan. A house near the beach in sunny San Diego is a far cry from the small terraced house where she grew up in North Dublin. But when Ethan’s firm offers a transfer to Ireland, Grace is unsure about moving back home and all the family pressure it will bring.
Erin Delaney has the perfect marriage, but still yearns for one thing – a child. Her husband John reassures her constantly that this will happen in good time. But Erin’s obsession with falling pregnant is getting worse and worse and soon puts a strain on their relationship.
As Beth, Grace and Erin all face big choices and changes of the heart, they soon realize their lives will never be the same again.
CATHERINE SANDERSON - FRENCH KISSING - 27TH AUGUST
Name: Sally Marshall.
Status: single mother.
Age: 32.
Nationality: 10 years in France, yet still English through and through.
I like: living in Paris, playing with my daughter Lila (4-years-old), the company of good friends, the smell of baking bread. So reads Sally’s ad, posted on a French online dating site called Rendez-Vous. Sally left Nicolas, her French boyfriend of ten years and Lila’s father, after she discovered he was having an affair with his secretary.
Six months have now passed, she’s beginning to bounce back. But making a new start is fraught with complications, and to what extent can she keep Lila and her love life separate…
EMMA HEATHERINGTON - PLAYING THE FIELD - 27TH AUGUST
On a career break in London, tomboy Cara McCarthy is thrilled to land a job as a ‘domestic assistant’ to Sophia Brannigan, the glamorous live-in girlfriend of hunky Premiership English footballer, Dylan Summers.
Sophia is a fame hungry, self obsessed, wannabe ‘celebrity’ who will stop at nothing to grace the pages of glossy Fab! magazine and her relationship with Dylan is on shaky ground since he strictly shuns the public attention she craves so much.
Soon, Cara finds herself lost in a fairytale world within the walls of the luxurious Summer Manor, where she samples from behind the scenes the life of a wealthy WAG whose weekly clothing allowance would pay for a month’s rent on her real life east end apartment.
When her job description extends to shadowing Sophia’s celebrity lifestyle, Cara balances the best of both worlds, experiencing the perks, the parties, the glitz, the glamour…and falling in love with the wrong man all over again .
Annie Valentine has hit the big time, and she’s thrilled! Years of hard graft as a Personal Shopper at The Store have paid off, and now Annie fronts her own show about how to dress and it’s a massive success. She loves doing working in fashion, but didn’t bank on being quite so busy. Annie’s boyfriend Ed is feeling slightly left out because Annie’s left him at home holding the babies - literally - as well as Annie’s older 2 children Lana and Owen. He’s not keen on the house renovations Annie’s planning either, never mind the fact she never seems to want to marry him. Will Annie’s career continue to get in the way of her personal life, or is the fame and glory everything Annie has ever wanted?! 
Carmen Reid is the author of seven novels, three of which star Annie Valentine, and we have reviewed her latest Annie Valentine adventure 
Annie Valentine is back! Annie, a successful personal shopper at The Store has hit the big time. She’s been offered a slot on a primetime TV show as a fashion advisor, and she can’t wait. But things go slightly wrong when Annie realises she has a tiny budget, unwilling participants and a co-star from hell. 
