Curtis Gage left the Outer Banks as a child when his mother swept him away after his father — the town’s revered police chief — died in the line of duty. Nineteen years later, he’s back as the new assistant manager of a five-star oceanfront resort, trying to make peace with a place that shaped him and a loss he was too young to properly grieve. The windswept coastline of North Carolina’s barrier islands is exactly as beautiful as he remembered. The complications are new. 🌊

Attorney Rae Alden has spent her career protecting the old-town families whose heritage is woven into this stretch of coast, and the resort’s expansion threatens to swallow Fortunate Harbor whole. She’s prepared to fight. What she isn’t prepared for is Curtis — a childhood sweetheart whose family tragedy once intersected with her own in ways she’s never fully reckoned with. 🏖️

Davis Bunn writes with the kind of atmospheric specificity that makes the Outer Banks feel less like a setting and more like a character — the light, the tides, the particular weight of a place where history is literal and the land itself holds memory. The romance between Curtis and Rae is grounded in that shared history, which gives it texture that pure strangers-meeting stories rarely achieve. ⚓

The buried treasure subplot — a secret deed and a long-lost map that explains why the property is worth more than anyone admitted — adds a genuinely fun adventure layer that elevates this beyond standard small-town romance territory. Bunn balances the personal and the plotted with an assured hand. 🗺️

What makes this special: A childhood sweethearts reunion set against a land dispute on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, complicated by family tragedy, a five-star resort expansion, and a secret treasure map that changes everything. Atmospheric, emotionally grounded, and a significant discount from its regular price.

One moment Susan Moore had everything — handsome husband, fabulous career, gorgeous Pacific Heights home, the full San Francisco dream. The next moment she was in a straitjacket in a padded room, and the dream was rubble. Lauretta Hignett opens with one of the more arresting first chapters in recent humorous fantasy, and the book never loses that momentum. 😂

Susan is clawing her way back — rebuilding brick by brick, optimism intact despite the very clear sense that the city has collectively decided to root against her. She’s over forty, starting over, and determined to make it work through sheer stubbornness. Then a group of ridiculously gorgeous people in what she assumes is elaborate Fae cosplay barges into her tiny apartment to inform her that she is, in fact, the chosen one. She decides to play along, because honestly, why not. 🧚

Hignett’s great skill here is comic timing — the beats land with the precision of someone who has thought very carefully about exactly when the joke should arrive. Susan’s voice is the engine of the whole enterprise: self-deprecating without being self-pitying, sharp without being cruel, and genuinely funny in the way that good comic fiction is funny, which is to say it’s also actually true about something. ✨

The midlife-woman-discovers-magic premise has become its own subgenre, but Hignett distinguishes herself with a protagonist whose backstory has genuine weight and a world that feels inventive rather than derivative. The question of whether Susan has gone insane or whether the magic is real is played with perfect ambiguity. 🌟

What makes this irresistible: A woman rebuilding her life after losing everything — including briefly her freedom — gets recruited by Fae beings to save the world, and her response is essentially “sure, beats therapy.” Hilarious, surprisingly moving, and a series opener that earns every laugh it gets.

Nora Dawson is twenty-nine and starting over. Her long-term engagement has just ended, and she’s left her hometown of Trafford, Alabama for Brentwood, Tennessee — rolling green hills, a new job, a clean slate. The job is at a retirement facility, which is either an odd choice for someone trying to escape the past or exactly the right one, depending on how you look at it. 🌿

Buck Turner has built a following with emotionally resonant Southern fiction — The Keeper of Stars established his voice, and The Hearts We Leave Behind deepens it. His instinct is to let stories unfold at the pace of a good front-porch conversation: unhurried, warm, and full of the kind of detail that makes fictional places feel like real ones you’ve visited. 🍑

The relationship that anchors the novel is between Nora and Fred Carlisle — a cantankerous old man at the facility whose prickly exterior guards a lifetime of stories. One of those stories, in particular, carries enough weight to redirect the course of Nora’s life. Turner handles the intergenerational friendship with care, never letting it tip into sentiment while never withholding the warmth that makes it matter. 💬

This is Southern fiction in the tradition of writers who understand that place isn’t just backdrop — it’s biography. The Tennessee hills aren’t decorative; they’re the kind of landscape that asks something of the people who live in it, and Turner’s characters respond accordingly. 🌄

Why this touches the heart: A young woman starting over after heartbreak takes a job at a retirement facility and finds in a cantankerous old man the story that changes everything. Warm, beautifully paced Southern fiction from an author who knows how to make you feel the landscape as much as the plot.