Raffaella Barker: 6 Novels (Chic-Lit/Rom-Com) - Kindle & ePub - Barbie1710

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We all want a perfect life. At what price?

What do you do when you should be happy, but you're not? What do you blame when you realise you don't want your husband anymore? What can you change when you see your family falling apart? What if you had the perfect life ... and it turned out to be anything but?




Gabriella has many siblings and many more animals. Her father is an impoverished poet with a penchant for mending cars with string and optimism, her mother a classicist now more concerned with trying to keep track of hectic family life the the declining of verbs.

Gabriella and her brothers run amuck through the attics and wilderness garden of their home Mildney. Here she experiences the triumphs and pitfalls of belonging to a wayward family; and longs for conformity. Her failure to achieve it is absolute.




Laura Sale has become invisible in her own life. Her domestic existence in North London with thirteen-year-old twins Dolly and Fred, and their father, the fascinating but ridiculously demanding Inigo, seems relentless, while her professional life fostering Inigo's career as Britain's most successful conceptual artist is frustrating and unfulfilling. What does she really like? What makes her laugh? Is a passionate existence passing her by?A chance encounter with Guy, the man she nearly married twenty years ago, is the catalyst she needs. Change comes in mysterious guises, and Laura finds herself confronting old ghosts, ferrets , a goat and a collapsing relationship, back in the rural Norfolk of her childhood holidays. As she starts to savour the space she has craved, she begins a new stage of her life with its own surprises, demons and delights. Taking control of her destiny, Laura finds it lit with possibility.




Venetia Summers appears to lead a fairy-tale rural existence with her husband and two sons in her tumbledown Norfolk cottage. But when her husband leaves her for his masseuse, not even the arrival of a splendid baby daughter can make up for the sense of loss she feels for her newly lopsided family. Hens Dancing follows Venetia's diaries over the course of a year. It tells of domestic battles - with an unruly garden, errant cockerels, Orcs and War Hammers and a traumatic bathroom conversion. But there are also consolations: a passion for fun fur, the severe beauty of the Norfolk landscape, the regal serenity of The Beauty (Venetia's baby daughter) and perhaps, amongst it all, the promise of new love.




For a year, Venetia Summers has been 'buffered from single-motherhood' by boyfriend David, but when work takes him to a Brazilian rainforest, things begin to unravel. Phone lines crackle, emails languish, and high-tech, long-distance love proves bewildering and vexing. Meanwhile the children and dogs run wilder than ever, brother Desmond's outrageous wedding takes over her home, and her relationship with her new neighbour, Hedley Sale, gets off to a rather unfortunate start.

How is Venetia to cope alone with outward-bound style holidays, a foul-mouthed parrot and her new career as a designer of demented cardigans? A moonlit walk takes an unexpected turn, and she finds herself with a real dilemma.




Christy Naylor feels as if she is being cut open; her life is wrenched apart when her mother dies and her father's crazed reaction is to gamble. He wins a fish farm in a game of poker and uproots them from their lives in the patchwork of suburbia to live on a couple of watery fields and a lake full of fish fry.

Unsettled and unsure of herself, Christy is seventeen, suffocating and suffering. Mick Fleet, tall, magnetic and overpowering, is irresistible. Christy falls for him, longing for him to hook her out of her sorrow and into his mystery. She knows nothing about him and plunges deep into an intense love affair, blind to the catastrophe he will bring...



About the Author
Raffaella Barker, daughter of the poet George Barker, was born and brought up in the Norfolk countryside. She is the author of seven acclaimed novels, Come and Tell Me Some Lies, The Hook, Hens Dancing, Summertime, Green Grass, Poppyland and A Perfect Life. She has also written a novel for young adults, Phosphorescence. She is a regular contributor to Country Life and the Sunday Telegraph and teaches on the Literature and Creative Writing BA at the University of East Anglia and the Guardian UEA Novel Writing Masterclass. Raffaella Barker lives in Cley next the Sea, Norfolk. www.raffaellabarker.co.uk