Applemere Summer

What more can you want when your life is perfect…? 

Jennie Pencarek has seen the miseries of the world. As a VAD nurse during the war, she saw more death and despair than should be experienced in a lifetime.

But with the war safely behind her, her life has become like a dream.

She lives next to her beloved Applemere House with her bookseller husband Richard and their twin children, Lynette and Jamie. The rest of her family resides nearby, each settled into a happy domestic home that promises peace and happy lives to come.

Even her wayward and often difficult friend Anna — now married to Jennie’s brother Freddie after a long-ago fling with Jennie’s other brother Tom — seems established and stable at last, even if she is still estranged from her parents, Sir Roger and Lady Fokingham.

But when Richard reveals that the family business, Pencarek Books, is in trouble, Jennie’s life is suddenly turned upside down.

Without the bookshop, their livelihood will disappear — and what will become of their wonderful life then?

Faced with bankruptcy, Jennie turns her mind to the problem and comes up with a brilliant new idea: a travelling bookshop bus that ploughs its way down the Kentish lanes to bring romance, mystery, and the classics straight to people’s doorsteps.

But when tragedy strikes, Jennie has no choice but to battle through every new challenge life throws at her.

And her seemingly hopeless quest to fulfil a promise she made to Anna leads her through grief and tragedy to love and acceptance, and along a path she had never dreamed of treading…

Set against the beautiful English countryside, Applemere Summer is a heart-warming tale about how far we will go to save our family.