Feel-good fiction to take you into another world...
Discover the best feel-good fiction to escape into another world, featuring beloved authors like Sophie Kinsella, Emily Giffin, Diana Gabaldon, and Jane Austen. From heartwarming romances like *Bridget Jones’s Diary* and *The Time Traveler’s Wife* to timeless classics and captivating adventures, this curated book list is your ultimate guide to uplifting reads that transport, comfort, and inspire. Whether you love chick lit, historical sagas, or fantasy epics, find your next cozy, immersive page-turner here.
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Godstone - The Kairos Boxes
by G. A. Williams
It is Christmas in England and Jacob is ecstatic when Rachel agrees to go on a date. Life apparently has reached its zenith. However, this joy proves to be short-lived when Jacob's uncle, a university professor, experiments with two ancient wooden boxes - only to suddenly find himself lost in the past. An ill-fated rescue attempt leaves all three trapped in different, perilous times. Hope comes in the unlikely form of an infamous criminal who is thrust into the time-sojourners' lives. Some mysterious Christian martyrs and the great Isaac Newton also cross their paths as they seek to escape the time-trap. As the story unfolds, the dark ages of martyrdom and Civil War cast more shadows than they shed light, on the origin of the mysterious 'Kairos Boxes'.
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Jane's Fame
by Claire Harman
“Wonderful . . . not only scholarly but indecently entertaining . . . her prose rings with good sense, affection, and humour.”—Daily Mail Mention Jane Austen and you’ll likely incite a slew of fervent opinions from anyone within earshot. Regarded as a brilliant social satirist by scholars, Austen also enjoys the sort of popular affection usually reserved for girl-next-door movie stars, leading to the paradox of an academically revered author who has served as the inspiration for chick lit (The Jane Austen Book Club) and modern blockbusters (Becoming Jane). Almost two hundred years after her death, Austen remains a hot topic, and the current flare in the cultural zeitgeist echoes the continuous revival of her works, from the time of original publication through the twentieth century. In Jane’s Fame, Claire Harman gives us the complete biography—of both the author and her lasting cultural influence—making this essential reading for anyone interested in Austen’s life, works, and remarkably potent fame.
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Becoming Jane Austen
by Jon Spence
Jon Spence's fascinating biography of Jane Austen paints an intimate portrait of the much-loved novelist. Spence's meticulous research has, perhaps most notably, uncovered evidence that Austen and the charming young Irishman Tom Lefroy fell in love at the age of twenty and that the relationship inspired Pride and Prejudice, one of the most celebrated works of fiction ever written. Becoming Jane Austen gives the fullest account we have of the romance, which was more serious and more enduring than previously believed. Seeing this love story in the context of Jane Austen's whole life enables us to appreciate the profound effect the relationship had on her art and on subsequent choices that she made in her life. Full of insight and with an attentive eye for detail, Spence explores Jane Austen's emotional attachments and the personal influences that shaped her as a novelist. His elegant narrative provides a point of entry into Jane Austen's world as she herself perceived and experienced it. It is a world familiar to us from her novels, but in Becoming Jane Austen, Austen herself is the heroine.
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Confessions of a Shopaholic
by Sophie Kinsella
Financial journalist Rebecca Bloomwood seeks solace from the boredom and pressures in life with her shopping, a solution that brings her close to financial disaster, until she encounters a story that will change her life.
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The Island
by Elin Hilderbrand
After her daughter, Chess, breaks off an engagement and her fiancé subsequently dies in a rock-climbing accident, divorcée Birdie Cousins encourages her younger daughter, Tate, and her sister, India, to join her and Chess on Tuckernack Island for a month, a time when deep secrets are soon revealed. By the best-selling author of The Castaways.
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The Man Who Folded Himself
by David Gerrold
This classic work of science fiction is widely considered to be the ultimate time-travel novel. When Daniel Eakins inherits a time machine, he soon realizes that he has enormous power to shape the course of history. He can foil terrorists, prevent assassinations, or just make some fast money at the racetrack. And if he doesn't like the results of the change, he can simply go back in time and talk himself out of making it! But Dan soon finds that there are limits to his powers and forces beyond his control.
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Bridget Jones's Diary
by Helen Fielding
Chronicles a year in the life of Bridget Jones, a single, thirtysomething woman on a perpetual quest for self-improvement, as she struggles to cope with relationships, weight control, and the other baffling complexities of modern life.
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The Complete Novels of Jane Austen
by Jane Austen
Jane Austen is without question, one of England's most enduring and skilled novelists. With her wit, social precision, and unerring ability to create some of literature's most charismatic and believable heroines, she mesmerises her readers as much today as when her novels were first published. Whether it is her sharp, ironic gaze at the Gothic genre invoked by the adventures of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey; the diffident and much put-upon Fanny Price struggling to cope with her emotions in Mansfield Park; her delightfully paced comedy of manners and the machinations of the sisters Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility; the quiet strength of Anne Elliot in Persuasion succeeding in a world designed to subjugate her very existence; and Emma - 'a heroine whom no one but myself will like' teased Austen - yet another irresistible character on fire with imagination and foresight. Indeed not unlike her renowned creator. Jane Austen is as sure-footed in her steps through society's whirlpools of convention and prosaic mores as she is in her sometimes restrained but ever precise and enduring prose.
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Bridget Jones
by Helen Fielding
Bridget searches for the Truth in spite of unevolved men, insane dating theories and smug married advice.
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The Spanish Bride
by Georgette Heyer
With the same ardor he so frequently displays in battle, Brigade-Major Harry Smith dives headlong into marriage. In his beautiful child-bride, Juana, he finds a kindred spirit, and a temper to match.
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The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
A Magical love story that is as sad as it is joyous.
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Jane Austen Ruined My Life
by Beth Pattillo
English professor Emma Douglas has always done everything just the way her minister father told her she should. Life was good until the day Emma finds her husband in bed with another woman. Suddenly, all her romantic notions, a la Jane Austen, are exposed as foolish dreams.
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Lunch in Paris
by Elizabeth Bard
"Documents how the author fell in love and discovered the excellence of French cuisine during a life-changing lunch, recounting her decision to leave her fast-paced New York life to build a life abroad marked by bustling marketplaces, bad-tempered butchers and decadent chocolate shops."
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Fly Away Home
by Jennifer Weiner
From the #1 "New York Times"-bestselling author of "In Her Shoes" and "Good in Bed" comes a novel about a family of women who seek refuge in an old beach house.
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Outlander
by Diana Gabaldon
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The first book in Diana Gabaldon’s acclaimed Outlander saga, the basis for the Starz original series. One of the top ten best-loved novels in America, as seen on PBS’s The Great American Read! Unrivaled storytelling. Unforgettable characters. Rich historical detail. These are the hallmarks of Diana Gabaldon’s work. Her New York Times bestselling Outlander novels have earned the praise of critics and captured the hearts of millions of fans. Here is the story that started it all, introducing two remarkable characters, Claire Beauchamp Randall and Jamie Fraser, in a spellbinding novel of passion and history that combines exhilarating adventure with a love story for the ages. Scottish Highlands, 1945. Claire Randall, a former British combat nurse, is just back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon when she walks through a standing stone in one of the ancient circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is a Sassenach—an “outlander”—in a Scotland torn by war and raiding clans in the year of Our Lord . . . 1743. Claire is catapulted into the intrigues of a world that threatens her life, and may shatter her heart. Marooned amid danger, passion, and violence, Claire learns her only chance of safety lies in Jamie Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior. What begins in compulsion becomes urgent need, and Claire finds herself torn between two very different men, in two irreconcilable lives.
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Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Lewis Stevenson
by Harman, Claire
No summary available.
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Something Borrowed
by Emily Giffin
In this "New York Times" bestselling novel, a woman wakes up the day after her 30th birthday to find her best friend's fianc in her bed.
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Francesca's Kitchen
by Peter Pezzelli
Determined to find another family that needs her since her own children have moved away, widow Francesca Campanile becomes a nanny for a single mom named Loretta, and, working her magic in the kitchen, brings this struggling family together. Original.
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Love the One You're With
by Emily Giffin
From the blockbuster bestselling author of "Something Borrowed, Something Blue" and "Baby Proof" comes an emotionally charged work about a chance encounter that forces one woman to question her decisions, her marriage, and herself.
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A&E Jewel in The Crown, The: 25TH Anniv. ED.
by JEWEL IN THE CROWN: 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
No summary available.
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A Total Waste of Makeup
by Kim Gruenenfelder
Charlize "Charlie" Edwards certainly knows, in theory, what it takes to lead a successful and happy life. She owns a nice house in Silverlake, LA's trendiest neighborhood. She has glamorous and loyal friends who accompany her to the hottest clubs in town. And she works as the personal assistant to Drew Stanton, Hollywood's sexiest movie star. But she's also turning 30, chronically single, and faced with serving as maid of honor at her younger sister's wedding. Charlie finds herself struggling to juggle the chaos of wedding planning (while wondering if she'll ever wear the white dress herself), her all-consuming job for lunatic boss Stanton, and a serious crush on Jordan, a photographer on the set of Drew's latest feature--a man who might actually return her feelings. A page-turner from start to finish, A Total Waste of Makeup puts a fresh face on women's fiction.
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Something Blue
by Emily Giffin
Warm and engaging; readers will find themselves cheering for Darcy as she proves people can change in this captivating tale. Booklist (starred review.).
