Maeve Binchy

Filled with Maeve Binchy's trademark wit and true storytelling genius, 'This Year It Will Be Different' powerfully evokes the lives of wives, husbands, children, friends and lovers, all set during the one holiday when feelings cannot easily be hidden.

Here is a great gift of wisdom and humour for anyone coping with actual aches and pains. Based on the author's own experience as a hip-replacement patient, she provides funny insider advice about coping with the ordeals of surgery, a hospital stay and at-home convalescence. This gem of an audiobook includes: Five things you can say to annoy the patient in the next bed How to put on elastic stockings Six ways to make non-alcoholic drinks bearable How...

Cathy Scarlet and Tom Feather have decided to create the best catering company in Dublin. They have plenty of talent, the perfect premises and even a few contacts. But not everyone is as pleased by the idea of 'Scarlet Feather' as they are. Tom's parents are disappointed that he has turned his back on the family business. Cathy's mother-in-law believes Cathy should be at home. And Tom's relationship with his beautiful, ambitious girlfriend is slowly...

Desmond and Deirdre Doyle will have been married for 25 years in October. It falls to the Doyles' eldest daughter, Anna, to decide how best to commemorate her parents' Silver Wedding. No use asking her sister Helen, living in her London convent, or her brother Brendan, who has chosen another form of exile on a bleak farm in the West of Ireland. But it is unthinkable not to have a party, even though for the Doyles, family occasions are more difficult...

Baby Frankie is born into an unusual family. Her mother is desperate to find someone to take care of her child and she doesn't have much time. Noel doesn't seem to be the most promising of fathers but despite everything, he could well be Frankie's best hope. As for Lisa, she is prepared to give up everything for the man she loves; surely he's going to love her back? And Moira is having none of it. She knows what's right, and has the power to change...

Just round the corner from St Jarlath's Crescent is Chestnut Street. Here, the lives of the residents are revealed in Maeve Binchy's wonderfully compelling tales: Bucket Maguire, the window cleaner, who must do more than he bargained for to protect his son. Nessa Byrne, whose aunt comes to visit from America for six weeks every summer and turns the house - and Nessa's world - upside down. Lilian, the generous girl with a big heart, and the fiance...

Kate Ryan and her husband, John, have a rollicking pub in the Irish village of Mountfern, four lovely children, and such wonderful dreams. But all that changes one fateful summer when American millionaire Patrick O?Neill comes to town with his irresistible charm and money to burn. As love and hate vie for a town?s quiet heart, old traditions begin to crumble away. Patrick O?Neill means to build the grand hotel of his dreams, with its promise of wealth...

Star Sullivan: Star Sullivan just wanted everyone to be happy - her father to stop gambling, her mother not to work so hard, her brother to stay out of trouble, her sister to stop worrying about every little thing she ate. Then the Hale family moved in next door, and from the moment Star saw 23-year-old Laddy Hale, everything began to change - until Star was no longer the sweet, thoughtful girl everyone loved and no one worried about ... The Garden...

Maeve Binchy is well-known for her bestselling novels, the most recent of which was 'A Week in Winter'. But for many years Maeve was a journalist, writing for The Irish Times. From 'The Student Train' to 'Plane Bores', 'Bathroom Joggers' to 'When Beckett met Binchy', these articles have all the warmth, wit and humanity of her fiction. Arranged in decades, from the 1960s to the 2000s, and including Maeve's first and last ever piece of writing for The...