Choose by cover. Then follow the feeling.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

A Harbour for Maeve

Sorcha Lennox

The gale warning hit the parish WhatsApp five minutes after Maeve Hayes dragged the first sheet of plywood from the storeroom, and three minutes after she decided she didn’t need anyone’s help to get it over the pub windows. Rain came at her sideways, a thousand pins seeking the seams in her sleeves. She braced a boot on the sill, drove a screw until the drill whined, and told herself she wouldn’t look when a van took the corner too fast and braked too hard outside.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

A House Full Again

Laura Carpenter

Nearly a year after his wife’s death, Cork father Darragh Kavanagh is keeping five children moving through school runs, grief, and a house that no longer sounds the same. When family-support worker Niamh Sloane keeps the door open without trying to rescue him, practical help becomes companionship, and the crowded life Darragh thought was over begins filling up again.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

A Song for the Small Hours

Laura Carpenter

Galway only pretended to sleep. It dimmed itself like a pub turning the lights low, as if that counted as closing. The city’s voice softened, the way a song softened when the singer stepped back from the mic—still there, still threaded through the air, just less demanding. Streetlamps burned gold against wet stone. Rain hung in the atmosphere like a rumour. The river kept talking, constant and unsentimental, as if it had never heard of grief.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

After Midnight

Skye Wilder

Night Ward — Book One · Book 1

The Night Shift Starts Before Midnight The first ambulance arrived at 23:47 with its siren cut off halfway down the ramp, as if even the machine had run out of breath. Dr. Siobhán Daly heard the wheels before she saw the trolley. A hard metallic rattle came through the ambulance bay doors, then a paramedic’s voice, clipped flat by rain and urgency. “Twenty-two-year-old male, found collapsed outside St.

Women's Fiction / Small-Town Romantic Comedy

Aunties of the Apocalypse

Laura Carpenter

Small-town life is rarely quiet when the aunties have opinions. Aunties of the Apocalypse mixes community meddling, family loyalty and romantic chaos with the particular danger of everybody knowing everybody.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

Bellavere at Midnight

Laura Carpenter

Bellavere Dynasty · Book 1

ONE HUNDRED YEARS At Bellavere Dublin, even the flowers had been instructed to look inherited. Maeve DeLuca knew because she had watched three men in dinner jackets and one terrified florist argue over a tower of white roses blocking half the eighteenth-century archway that led from the ballroom to the east service corridor. The florist kept saying, “Mr. Bellavere approved the concept.”

Contemporary Women's Fiction

Blackwater Road Club

Laura Carpenter

Rain came sideways over the Blackwater Road pitch, the sort of rain that did not fall so much as arrive with an opinion. It drove under hoods, into sleeves, behind collars, into the soft places at the back of the knees where tracksuit bottoms clung and gave up. By half past seven on a February evening, every coat along the sideline had gone the same dark colour.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

Clover and Riverlight

Laura Carpenter

The Good Cups The kettle sang like it had heard gossip and was morally obliged to spread it. Aunt Máiréad tapped the handle twice before she lifted it. Once for luck, once because she trusted nothing that came to a boil too quickly. Maeve stood on the footstool beneath the good-cup cupboard, eight years old, trusted with porcelain but not boiling water, which felt like a personal insult and a sensible policy at the same time.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

Council Estate Saints

Laura Carpenter

The first time the fire door failed, nobody called it failure. They called it sticky. They called it one of those things. They called it the sort of problem you reported twice, maybe three times if you had the patience for the online portal and a password that had not expired while you were trying to remember whether you had used a capital letter or the name of the dead dog.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

Crossing Home

Laura Carpenter

The ferry bell rang once for the living and twice for the dead, and on Inish Rua everyone knew which count the sea preferred. By nine that November night, Captain Niall O’Rourke had already carried three nurses, a crate of antibiotics, two sacks of lamb meal, and one furious priest across a black channel that had no interest in mercy. The fourth crossing should have been cancelled.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

Endless Adoration

Laura Carpenter

Days to Come Saga • · Book 5

The kitchen was a riot of sound and motion, the kind of chaos that came from four children all insisting on being in the same space at once. The twins were shrieking over a spilled bag of flour, their older brother drumming a wooden spoon against the counter in protest of not being heard, and the baby, barely toddling, wobbled toward the oven with dangerous intent.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

Every Room Has a Witness

Laura Carpenter

The first notice arrived folded into the mouth of a brown envelope and stamped twice, as if the county itself had lost patience and struck the paper harder the second time. Nóra Harte found it on the kitchen table at six fourteen in the morning, beneath the chipped blue mug her mother had used until the day she died, beside a school permission slip for Finn’s hurling blitz and three coins saved for the hospital vending machine.

Women's Fiction / Romantic Suspense

Ferry Weather

Rhys MacIan

On the Galway coast, Nora Fahey faces a possession notice that threatens Ardglass House and uncovers a buried family scandal, while Ciaran Vale returns with evidence that the fight over her home reaches far beyond property. A women's fiction romantic suspense novel about family, inheritance, truth, and the price of staying.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

Fragment of Us

Laura Carpenter

First Light Ciara remembered forever as a word Daniel had once spoken without ceremony, in a doorway dampened by rain, when neither of them yet understood how memory could turn a promise into disputed evidence. The kettle worried at the quiet behind her. Rain silvered the window, and the flat seemed to gather itself around the question he had brought home. Daniel stood with rain darkening his shoulders, steady and uncertain at once, as though courage were simply the refusal to leave before hearing the answer.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

Graydon and Lyoness

Laura Carpenter

She lets the kettle sing because if she cuts the song short, the day will feel unfinished. Steam rounds the kitchen window; she rubs a small circle clear with her knuckles and sees the Liffey in its expensive grey. Seven months along, nineteen years old, and somehow both. Orla answers her palm with a deliberate push—hello, I’m here—then settles like tide easing against a harbour wall.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

Nearly There God Love Us

Laura Carpenter

Crown & Clover — The Brighthelm Saga

One True Thing The first missed call came through while Rowan of Brighthelm was standing beside a pallet of winter blankets in an aircraft hangar that smelled of diesel, rain, and other people's emergencies. He felt the phone buzz against his hip and did not reach for it. That was how disaster usually entered royal life: not with a scream, not with a headline, not even with a locked door, but with one small vibration ignored because duty had been placed in a man's hands and a photographer had been placed ten feet away to make sure he held it correctly.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

Stormproof aghra

Laura Carpenter

The bell in the debate hall rang half a second off true, cracked somewhere down its brass throat years before either of them had arrived at St. Aidan’s, and Maeve Gallagher loved it for the same reason she loved Derry in the rain—because imperfections sounded honest if you listened long enough. Most people at St. Aidan’s mistook confidence for volume. Maeve knew better.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

The Body in the Archive Room

Laura Carpenter

The first thing Cormac Keane noticed was the ferry timetable in the dead woman’s hand. Not the blood. Not the angle of her shoulder against the bottom shelf. Not the shoe lying half under the grey archive table as if she had kicked it off in irritation and meant to come back for it once the county had finished annoying her. Those things arrived afterwards, in the ordinary terrible order.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

The Council of Sisters

Laura Carpenter

On national election count day in Wicklow, Nóra Kelleher receives evidence that could destroy careers, expose a buried family scandal, and prove that the women dismissed as background players have been keeping the county’s real record all along. As political pressure closes in, sisters, mothers and daughters must decide whether protecting family still means protecting the lie.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

The Garden Before Dawn

Laura Carpenter

Before dawn, the palace belonged to women who carried numbers in their heads and keys at their waists. That was not how men described it, of course. Men who ruled things in daylight liked to imagine the dark belonged to prayer, to silence, to their own unfinished thoughts turning dignified beneath carved ceilings. They thought the empire slept and woke under their names.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

The Man Who Stayed

Laura Carpenter

The kettle was cold. That was the first thing Aisling Moore noticed when she opened the back door of her father’s house and let herself into the kitchen where half her childhood had happened in steam, quarrels, rashers, and people pretending not to cry. Not the dust lying grey along the windowsill. Not the stack of unopened letters held down by a chipped mug with GARDA COMMUNITY RAFFLE 2009 fading from blue to a tired sort of purple.

Women’s Fiction / Institutional Suspense

The Mercy Name

Laura Carpenter

Names can protect, conceal and bind people to institutions long after the paperwork says otherwise. The Mercy Name blends women’s fiction with institutional suspense, keeping family, identity and accountability close to the centre.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

The Night Map

Laura Carpenter

The bog road held its breath as the crowd settled, faces tipped up like flowers. Nell let the hush be the first lesson. She kept her gloves off so the cold could tutor her bones into paying attention, breath slow, shoulders loose. Beside her, Jamie tracked the edges—parking tucked, torches red, path markers wearing their little reflective tags like saints’ medals.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

The Radio Hour

Laura Carpenter

When a community radio broadcast exposes missing housing files and coerced family decisions, production assistant Nóra Hynes learns how quickly a microphone can become evidence. Years later, with the old scandal threatening the fragile life she has built, Nóra must decide whether protecting her family means keeping quiet—or turning the red light back on and letting the county hear what powerful people worked so hard to bury.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

The Sons of Emergency Light

Laura Carpenter

The first emergency light in the Galway count centre went red at twenty-three minutes past six, and every person beneath it pretended not to notice. That was how counties survived themselves: by giving danger a polite nod, making room for it beside the tea urn, and calling the whole performance community. Maeve Killeen noticed. She always noticed. Door codes, lanyard colours, the way a superintendent held his phone face down when a councillor’s wife passed, the little pause before a clerk said a name that used to be protected by old money.

Upmarket Women’s Fiction

The Summer We Told the Truth

Seren Muir

Some summers divide a life into before and after. The Summer We Told the Truth is a quiet, emotionally observant novel about family truths, reinvention and what becomes possible once silence is no longer useful.

Contemporary Women’s Fiction / Romance

Where We Stayed

Laura Carpenter

Leaving and staying are rarely opposites when a place is tangled up with family and love. Where We Stayed is contemporary women’s fiction about attachment, change and the relationships that make home difficult to define.