SUMMER AT LITTLE BEACH STREET BAKERY
Little Beach Street Bakery #2
Jenny Colgan
Releasing March 22nd, 2016
William Morrow
The New York Times-bestselling
author of Little Beach Street Bakery and Christmas at the Cupcake Café returns
with a delightful new novel-with recipes!-that is already an international
bestseller and is perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes, Meg Donohue, and Sophie
Kinsella.
For fans of Jojo Moyes and Elin
Hilderbrand, an irresistible novel—moving and funny, soulful and sweet—about
happiness, heartache, and hope. And recipes.
A thriving bakery. A lighthouse to
call home. A handsome beekeeper. A pet puffin. These are the things that Polly
Waterford can call her own. This is the beautiful life she leads on a tiny
island off the southern coast of England.
But clouds are gathering on the
horizon. A stranger threatens to ruin Polly’s business. Her beloved boyfriend
seems to be leading a secret life. And the arrival of a newcomer—a bereft widow
desperately searching for a fresh start—forces Polly to reconsider the choices
she’s made, even as she tries to help her new friend through grief.
Unpredictable and unforgettable,
this delightful novel will make you laugh, cry, and long for a lighthouse of
your own. Recipes included.
A Word from Jenny
Hello!
And welcome to the Little Beach Street Bakery… if you’ve been here before,
lovely to see you again! If it’s your first time, well, you are so welcome, and
I hope you are hungry. Let me give you a quick catch-up before we get started.
(Neil fans: don’t worry. He’s back).
Okay,
so Polly lost her business in Plymouth and had to start all over again. She
moved to a coastal town in Cornwall, where the tide comes in twice a day and
covers the causeway. When she couldn’t find a job, she started baking bread,
because that’s what she loves to do, and soon incurred the wrath of Mrs. Manse,
who ran the town bakery (very badly).
Anyways,
eventually Polly won her around and started working there. Meanwhile, she has a
brief affair with one of the fishermen, Tarnie, then found out to her utter
horror that he was married. He later died in a terrible storm, and it took –
and is still taking – everyone a very long time to get over it.
Polly
fell in love, finally, with Huckle, a big American chap who makes his own
honey. She also inadvertently adopted a puffin and has, probably against her
better judgment, just decided to buy a lighthouse.
Right,
I think we’re up to date! I do hope you enjoy Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery; I so loved writing it.
A Quick Word about the Setting
Cornwall
to me is a place of the imagination as much as a real home to lots of people
because I spent so much time there as a child. To me, it is like a version of
Narnia or any of the other imaginary lands I liked to visit – I was absolutely
obsessed with Over Sea, Under Stone,
and of course the Famous Five and Malory Towers.
We
used to stay in old tin-miners’ cottages near Polperro. My mother was a great
Daphne du Maurier fan, and she used to put me and my two brothers to sleep in
the little narrow beds and tell us bloodcurdling stories of shipwrecks and
pirates and gold and wreckers, and we would be utterly thrilled and chilled and
one of us, probably my littlest brother – although he would probably say me –
would be up half the night with nightmares.
Compared
to chilly Scotland, sunny Cornwall was like paradise to me. Every year, we were
bought those big foam body surfboards as a special treat, and we would get into
the water first thing in the morning and body surf, body surf, body surf until
physically hauled out, sunburnt along the crossed strap lines of my swimming
costume, to eat a gritty sandwich wrapped in cling film.
Later
my dad would barbecue fish over the little home-built Barbie he constructed
every year from bricks and a grill, and I would sit in the high sweet grass,
read books and get bitten by insects.
And
after that (because you get to stay up very late on your holidays), we’d drive
down to Mousehole or St. Ives and eat ice cream while strolling along the
harbor looking at the art galleries. Or we’d eat hot salty fried potatoes, or
fudge, the flavors of which I was constantly obsessed with, even though fudge
invariably makes me feel sick.
They
were blissful times, and it was such a joy to revisit them when I started
writing my Mount Polbearne series. We went on a day trip – as required by law,
I think, of anyone visiting Cornwall – to St. Michael’s Mount, and I remember
being gripped and fascinated by the old stone road disappearing under the
waves. It was the most romantic and magical thing I could possibly imagine, and
it has been such a joy setting my books there. If I can convey through my books
even a fraction of the happiness Cornwall has brought me in my life…well, I’ll
be absolutely delighted.
Jenny
xxx
Chapter 1
“Stop
it,” Polly said in a warning voice. “It’s not funny.”
Neil
ignored her and continued to beat on the little high window with his beak until
she could be persuaded to go over and give him a snack.
He
was outside the lighthouse they had moved into the previous month, all three of
them together, Polly, Neil the puffin, and Huckle, Polly’s American boyfriend,
who has parked his motorbike and sidecar at the bottom of the tower. It was
their only mode of transport.
The
lighthouse hadn’t been lived in for a long time, not since the lamps were
electrified in the late seventies. It has four floors and a circular staircase
that ran around the sides, thus making it, as Huckle had pointed out more than
once, the single draftiest place in human history. They were both getting very
fit running up and down it. One floor held the heavy machinery that had one
turned the workings, which couldn’t be removed. On the top floor, just below
the light itself, was their sitting room, which has views right across the bay
and, on the other side, back toward Mount Polbearne, the tidal island where
they lived and worked, with its caseway to the mainland that covered and
uncovered itself with the tides.
From
these windows you could see the little Beach Street Bakery, the ruined shop
that Polly had revitalized when she has moved to the village just over two
years ago, getting over a failed business and a failed relationship back on the
mainland.
She
hadn’t originally expected to do much in Mount Polbearne except sit and lick
her wounds until she was ready to head back into the fray again, back to
working a corporate lifestyle; hadn’t for a moment thought that in the
tumbledown flat above the shop she would come back to life by practicing her
favorite hobby – baking bread – and that this would turn into a career when she
reopened the old closed-down bakery.
It
wasn’t the most lucrative of careers, and the hours were long, but the setting
was so wonderful, and her work so appreciated, by both the townspeople and the
tourists, that she had found something much satisfying than money: she has
found what she was meant to be doing with her life. Well, most of the time she
thought that. Sometimes she looked around at the very basic kitchen she had
installed (her old flat in Plymouth had sold, and she’d managed to get the
lighthouse at a knockdown price mostly, as Lance the estate agent had pointed out,
because only an absolutely crazy person could possibly want to live in a draft,
inaccessible tower with a punishing light shining out of it) and wondered if
she’d ever manage to fix the window frames, the window frames being number one
on a list of about four thousand things that urgently needed doing.
Huckle
had offered to buy the place with her, but she had resisted. She had worked too
hard to be independent. Once before she had shared everything, been entirely
enmeshed financially with someone. It had not worked out, and she was in no
mood to repeat the experience.
Right
now, she wanted to sit in her eyrie of a sitting room at the very top of the
house, drink tea, eat a cheese twist and simply relax and enjoy the view: the
sea, ever changing; clouds scudding past so close she could touch them; the
little fishing boats bobbing out across the water in faded greens and browns,
their winches and nets heavy behind them, looking tiny and fragile against the
vast expanse of the sea. She just needed five minutes’ peace and quiet before
heading down to the bakery to relieve her colleague Jayden for the lunchtime
shift.
Neil,
the little puffin who had crashed into her life one night in a storm and
remained there ever since, did not agree. He found the activity of flying
outside, high up, and still being able to see her through the window utterly
amazing, and liked to do it again and again, sometimes taking off to fly all
the way around the lighthouse and come back in the other side, sometimes
pecking at the glass because Huckle thought it was funny to feed him tidbits
out of the window even though Polly had told him not to.
Polly
put down her book and moved over to the window, struck as she never ceased to
be – she wondered if she would ever grow tired at it – by the amazing cast of
the sun silvering in and out behind the clouds over the waves, the gentle cawk
of the seagulls and the whistling wind, which could turn thunderous on winter
days. She still couldn’t quite believe she lived here. She opened the old-fashioned,
single-glazed window with its heavy latch.
“Come
in then,” she said, but Neil fluttered excitedly and tried to peck in between
her fingers in case she had a tasty treat for him.
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Jenny Colgan is the New York Times-bestselling author of numerous novels,
including Christmas at the Cupcake Café, Little Beach Street Bakery, and Meet
Me at the Cupcake Café, all international bestsellers. Jenny is married with
three children and lives in London and Scotland.
1 comment:
Thank you for hosting SUMMER AT LITTLE BEACH STREET BAKERY today!
Crystal, Tasty Book Tours
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