Jenny Bayliss crafts stories of second chances and romantic comedies brimming with humor and heart. Her work features a warm perspective on relationships, exploring the joys found in everyday life. Bayliss focuses on characters discovering new love and themselves in unexpected circumstances. Her writing is kind and uplifting.
Amidst a holiday season filled with challenges, Harriet Smith grapples with loneliness after her daughter chooses to spend Christmas in Manhattan. Seeking comfort, she finds herself involved in a one-night stand that complicates her life further when she agrees to direct a final Christmas performance at the town's old Winter Theater. Tasked with this responsibility alongside her former fling, Harriet embarks on a journey that has the potential to rekindle her holiday spirit and bring joy back into her life.
The story revolves around estranged half-sisters Maggie, Simone, and Star, who reunite at their father's will reading after years apart. Their father, Augustus, has left them an inheritance contingent on completing a series of challenges, stirring a mix of reluctance and necessity among the sisters. Amidst humorous escapades and community antics, the journey prompts them to confront their past and seek reconciliation. Set against the backdrop of a winter solstice celebration, the narrative explores themes of love, hope, and familial bonds.
A charmingly quirky seaside town offers a recently separated restauranteur a fresh start and possibly a new lease on love in A Season for Second Chances, by the author of The Twelve Dates of Christmas. Annie Sharpe’s spark for life has fizzled out. Her kids are grown up, her restaurant is doing just fine on its own, and her twenty-six-year marriage has come to an unceremonious end. Untethered for the first time in her adult life, she finds a winter guardian position in a historic seaside home and decides to leave her city life behind for a brand-new beginning. When she arrives in Willow Bay, Annie is enamored by the charming house, the invigorating sea breeze, and the town’s rich seasonal traditions. Not to mention, her neighbors receive her with open arms—that is, all except the surly nephew of the homeowner, whose grand plans for the property are at odds with her residency. As Christmas approaches, tensions and tides rise in Willow Bay, and Annie’s future seems less and less certain. But with a little can-do spirit and holiday magic, the most difficult time of her life will become…a season for second chances.
The Twelve Dates of Christmas is an uplifting festive romance by debut author Jenny Bayliss, for everyone who loves One Day in December and The Holiday.
