The Choice ~ Nicholas Sparks

"Travis Parker has everything a man could want: a good job, loyal friends, even a waterfront home in small-town North Carolina. In full pursuit of the good life -- boating, swimming, and regular barbecues with his good-natured buddies -- he holds the vague conviction that a serious relationship with a woman would only cramp his style. That is, until Gabby Holland moves in next door. Despite his attempts to be neighborly, the appealing redhead seems to have a chip on her shoulder about him...and the presence of her longtime boyfriend doesn't help. Despite himself, Travis can't stop trying to ingratiate himself with his new neighbor, and his persistent efforts lead them both to the doorstep of a journey that neither could have foreseen. Spanning the eventful years of young love, marriage and family, The Choice ultimately confronts us with the most heartwrenching question of all: how far would you go to keep the hope of love alive?"

Read by Robyn S.

The Wedding ~ Nicholas Sparks

"After thirty years of marriage, Wilson Lewis, son-in-law of Allie and Noah Calhoun (of The Notebook), is forced to admit that the romance has gone out of his marriage. Desperate to win back his wife, Jane's, heart, he must figure out how to make her fall in love with him... again. Despite the shining example of Allie and Noah's marriage, Wilson is himself a man unable to easily express his emotions. A successful estate attorney, he has provided well for his family, but now, with his daughter's upcoming wedding, he is forced to face the fact that he and Jane have grown apart and he wonders if she even loves him anymore. Wilson is sure of one thing--his love for his wife has only deepened and intensified over the years. Now, with the memories of his in-laws' magnificent fifty-year love affair as his guide, Wilson struggles to find his way back into the heart of the woman he adores."

Read by Robyn S.

Love All ~ Elizabeth Jane Howard

"A  slow moving, melancholic and elegiac novel set in the late 1960s in Melton, a small town in the West Country. The story revolves around a disparate group of people who come together there to establish an arts festival. There is Jack Curtis a self-made millionaire who has bought and refurbished the local stately home, Florence Plover, a garden designer in her sixties whom he has employed and her Anglo-Greek niece, Persephone. There are the Musgrove siblings, Thomas and Mary, whose family originally owned Melton Hall, who run a failing garden nursery nearby and there is Francis Brock, whose sister Celia, Thomas's wife, was tragically killed in a car crash some years previously."

This is the story of their intertwining relationships and how they come to love, and not to love each other in different ways and why - Slow, rambling and full of extraneous characters, this book only held my attention because of the homely setting and the promise that surely something would change in the lives of the people involved. I found the action unsatisfactory because the arts festival at the centre of the story wasn't covered at all, and because the challenges posed for the various key characters weren't really fully explored. Like other reviewers, I found Thomas annoying and Mary the martyr irritating, even if their responses to their life situations were realistic for the late sixties. Disappointingly, the most interesting and central character, Percy, simply faded away at the end of the novel, never to be seen again, The whole story was a bit disjointed cutting between all the characters nothing was ever really resolved by any of the characters.

Read by Robyn S.