The Bookshop by the River

Claire Bennett hasn't been back to Ashcombe in six years. She's been busy — there were promotions, quarterly reports, reasons. Now her aunt Margaret is gone, and the bookshop is hers, and she has six months to decide what to do with it.

The plan is simple: sell the shop, settle the estate, return to her life in Toronto.

What she doesn't plan for is Jessie, the seventeen-year-old who already has keys and opinions about everything. Or Nora, who arrives with soup and transparent intentions. Or Ethan Walker, the carpenter who did repairs for Margaret and seems to keep finding things that still need fixing.

The Bookshop by the River is a novel about grief dressed as paperwork, kindness that arrives as pie, and the particular danger of staying somewhere long enough to love it.

Part of The Beautifully Ordinary Series

Some love stories begin with grand gestures. These don't.

The Beautifully Ordinary Series is a collection of warm, quietly romantic stories about ordinary people navigating ordinary days — and finding, in the middle of them, something they weren't looking for. A bookshop inherited from a beloved aunt. A beekeeper who prefers her hives to most people. A man who always orders tea. A new mother keeping a notebook at three in the morning.

Each book in the series stands alone. Each one is an invitation to slow down.