Summer at Hartley's

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Her mother has sold the family ice-cream parlour. The man hired to take it apart has fallen in love with it — and with her. Five sisters. One ice-cream parlour. One very long summer. Imogen Hartley is thirty-seven, a London divorce solicitor on the brink of partnership, and home in Merrow Bay for one weekend — until her mother stands up over the crab and announces that she has sold Hartley's, the family's 1936 seafront ice-cream parlour, to a boutique hotel company, and is off to see the world. Rhodri Emlyn is the architect hired to turn it into a hotel. He is Welsh, recently and very politely divorced, and he has fallen hopelessly in love with a black glass counter and a terrazzo floor full of scallop shells. He is not supposed to fall for the eldest Hartley daughter as well. Then the sale starts going wrong. Forty-one planning objections arrive overnight — seventeen of them from people buried in the churchyard. Someone pulls the plug on four hundred litres of ice cream. A bat roost appears in a loft that has never seen a bat. With five weeks to exchange, four sisters, a seventy-two-year-old ice-cream maker and a great many gulls, Imogen has to work out who is trying to stop the sale — and what she wants for herself. • A warm, funny seaside romance with a mystery at its heart, set on the present-day Northumberland coast. • Sensual, not explicit. Two narrators. A found family you'll want to move in with. • Book one of the Merrow Bay Sisters — every sister gets her own story. Perfect for readers of Jenny Colgan, Sarah Morgan and Holly Martin.