Your Avelrow shelf.

Sports Romance

After the Match

Nessa Calder

Physiotherapist and single mother Aoife Byrne has built a careful life around work, community and her fierce nine-year-old daughter. When football star Eoin Daly returns home for a testimonial season, the boy she once loved walks back into the leisure centre carrying an injured knee, a changed life and the history neither of them has quite buried. As school visits, family loyalties and the pressure of public attention pull them closer, Aoife and Eoin must decide whether a second chance can be built from something quieter than grand gestures: trust, ordinary reliability, and the courage to stay after the match is over.

Small-Town Romance

All the Little Safeties

Laura Carpenter

Ana Byrne learned the weight of a secret at half past six on a Tuesday morning, standing barefoot on the cold tile of her bathroom with the sea still black beyond the window and a white plastic stick balanced on the rim of the sink like a verdict too small for the crime. The house was silent around her. Not peaceful. Silence, Ana had decided years ago, was only peace when someone had chosen it kindly.

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 Romance / Market Community Romance

Bloom and Brine

Laura Carpenter

The house woke in layers: pipes first, then the low throat-clearing of the kettle, then the soft lamp in the hall throwing lemon-coloured light across the runner Ava kept bunching with her socks. Niamh moved through it all before dawn with the alert, practised quiet of a woman who could not afford a sloppy morning. She liked those first minutes because nobody wanted anything yet.

Small-Town Romance

Borrowed Cottage Hearts

Sorcha Lennox

Ronan O’Doherty had never liked the way the cottage fell quiet at night. It wasn’t real quiet, not with the wind coming in off the Atlantic and rattling the old storm windows, and the sea pushing itself up against the harbour wall like it might finally work out how to climb. The pipes clanked, the turf in the grate sighed and settled, and somewhere down the hall his father snored like a tractor that ought to be retired.

Small-Town Romance

Bowl and Broth

Laura Carpenter

Rain stitched the glass over the market into a soft quilt, each pane a patch catching the morning. Up in the loft nook, Aoife Hanratty set her fingertips to the centred clay and listened the way other people watch. A steady wheel, a steady breath. She opened the lump with her thumbs and drew the wall up, guarding it with her palms until a bowl stood there—simple, willing, almost itself.

Sports Romance / Community Women’s Fiction

Claddaghmore Gaels

Laura Carpenter

Claddaghmore Gaels sequence

Sport, community and the loyalties built around both sit at the heart of Claddaghmore Gaels. It is a romance about belonging to a team, a town and, eventually, to someone.

Chapter Books

Clodagh and the Teacup Train

Clodagh Fairlie

Avelrow Chapter Book Shelf

The first coat lifted off its peg at ten minutes past four, which was a terrible time for a coat to develop opinions. It was Mrs Hegarty's yellow raincoat, the one with two pockets full of old receipts and one sleeve that smelt faintly of peppermint creams. It rose slowly, as if trying not to be noticed, and bumped its hood against the ceiling of St Brigid Community Hall.

Sports Romance / Community Wedding Romance

County and Wedding

Nessa Calder

Claddaghmore Gaels sequence

A wedding brings the Claddaghmore community together with all the old loyalties, sporting rivalries and romantic complications that follow. County and Wedding is warm, lively and rooted in people who know one another too well.

Cozy Mystery

Death at the Jam Table

Bridie Rowan

At Ballycuan's St Brigid fair, jam judge Fintan Vale is found dead beside two near-identical blackberry jars—one bearing Mara Kelleher's name. As librarian Cillian Struan notices an old recipe card, a stained heritage map and a storm lamp tied to secrets the village would rather preserve, a cozy competition becomes an investigation into buried family and community history.

Small-Town Romance

Girls of Copper Street

Sorcha Lennox

Ferry Ticket The ferry terminal at two in the morning looked less like a place for travel than a place where people came to be judged by fluorescent lights. Grace Mallon stood beneath one of them with her hood stuck to the back of her neck, her suitcase listing against her shin, and a paper cup of tea cooling in her hand because she had forgotten she was holding it.

Romantic Comedy / Community Romance

The Doctor Is on Air

Bronagh Fairburn

Fionn Meadowes Romantic Comedies

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.

Romantic Comedy / Second-Chance Romance

The Plus-One Problem

Bronagh Fairburn

Two years after Aunt Deirdre’s death, Maeve Harrington receives one final instruction: bring a plus-one to her parents’ anniversary dinner, but not a safe lie. Then Rory Gallagher—the chaotic, camera-carrying man tied to the worst night of Maeve’s life—turns up on her doorstep. Three weeks, one empty chair and a town full of opinions leave Maeve facing the second chance she never planned to admit she wanted.

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.

Holiday Romance

Wrong Chat Right Man

Aoife Winters

Molly Hayes knew the exact sound a lie made when it arrived in a town that still pretended gossip was community care. It came in bright little pings. It came dressed as concern. It came while she was flipping Sunday pancakes one-handed, holding her phone between chin and shoulder, and telling seven other mothers that yes, of course she had remembered the raffle tickets, the gluten-free buns, and the permission slips for the children who were allergic to everything except chaos.