A Distant Shore (34 page)

Previously published as a magazine serial,
Out in the Country
is a heartwarming novel celebrating the strength of family, friends, and second chances of all kinds.

You can also check out one of my Harlequin romances, or my latest women’s fiction from CarinaUK,
This Fragile Life
:

This Fragile Life
: You love your best friend. You trust her with your life. But could you give her the most precious gift of all? Alex’s life is a mess. She’s barely holding down a job, only just affording her apartment, and can’t remember when she was last in a relationship. An unexpected pregnancy is the last thing she needs. Martha’s life is on track. She’s got the high-flying career, the gorgeous home and the loving husband. But one big thing is missing. Five rounds of IVF and still no baby. The solution seems simple. Alex knows that Martha can give her child everything that she can’t provide. But Martha’s world may not be as perfect as it seems, and letting go isn’t as easy as Alex expected it to be. Now they face a decision that could shatter their friendship forever.

Writing As Katharine Swartz:

The Vicar’s Wife
: Jane Hatton and her British husband Andrew relocate from New York City to a small village on the Cumbrian coast. Jane has been city-based and career-driven but when her fourteen year old daughter Natalie falls in with the wrong crowd at school in Manhattan, she and Andrew decide to try country living. However Jane has trouble getting used to the silence and solitude of a remote village. Natalie hates her new school, and eleven-year-old Ben struggles academically. Only eight-year-old Merrie enjoys country life. Has Jane made a horrible mistake? The Hattons have bought the old vicarage in the village. When Jane finds a scrap of shopping list, she grows curious about Alice, the vicar’s wife who lived there years before. As we follow the twin narratives of Jane, in the present, and Alice in the 1930s we discover that both are on a journey to discover their true selves, and to address their deepest fears.

The Other Side of The Bridge
: Ava Lancet has lost her job, her marriage, and her baby when she discovers she has inherited her grandmother’s dilapidated farmhouse in a tiny village in central Greece. With the kind of emotional impulsiveness that has frustrated her stony-faced husband for years, she decides to move there and recover from life’s sorrows. It only takes a few minutes in her new home to realize just what a dump it is, and how ridiculously rash her decision was. Yet Ava perseveres, and thanks to her grandmother’s legacy, is welcomed into the village... as well as by handsome widower Andreas Lethikos.

When an elderly woman in the village mistakes Ava for her grandmother, telling her, with tears trickling down her face, that she is so sorry, Ava is both touched and intrigued. What is the woman sorry for, and what secrets did her grandmother keep? With the help of a local schoolteacher who is interviewing the remaining Second World War survivors in central Greece, Ava discovers the surprising threads of her grandmother’s life... and they help to weave her own life back together.

In 1942, in Italian and Nazi-occupied Greece, Ava’s grandmother Sophia Paranoussis is fighting to keep her family, and especially her impulsive sister Angelika, safe. When she is approached by a stranger to help with the local Resistance, she longs to refuse, yet a sense of both duty and honor compel her to agree. Frightened and yet with growing courage, Sophia begins to aid twelve British SOEs who have parachuted into Greece to blow up the Gorgopotamos

viaduct—and falls in impossible love with one of them.

Spanning three generations and exploring the lives of two very different and yet surprisingly similar women, The Other Side of The Bridge will remind you how a fragile hope can spring from both tragedy and despair.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate Hewitt was born in Pennsylvania. After living in New York City for several years, she moved to the northwest coast of England where she now lives with her husband, an Anglican minister, her five children, and an overly affectionate Golden Retriever. She also writes under the name Katharine Swartz. You can learn more about her books at
www.kate-hewitt.com
or
www.katharineswartz.com
.