The Perils of Proximity​

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Eight authors imagine Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet pushed into uncomfortably close quarters—by storms and sickrooms, by garden sheds and curses, by the cruel and convenient hand of fate.

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A thrown letter at the bottom of a well unleashes consequences no one could have foreseen. A riding accident leaves Darcy at the mercy of the very family he had been at such pains to avoid. A summer storm strands him at the parsonage with the woman who has just refused his hand. A locked garden shed becomes the unlikely scene of an even more unlikely conversation. A fortnight at a country house party offers a second chance at the words he wishes he had never spoken.

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From quiet reconciliations over a cooling cup of tea to comic disasters involving mushrooms of an inadvisable variety, from a Lydia Bennet at her most reformable to a Darcy who is anything but a gentleman of leisure, The Perils of Proximity gathers eight wholly distinct novellas united by a single, irresistible question: What happens when there is nowhere left to go but Love?

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• Certain Evils by Amy D’Orazio     

• Building Bridges by Ali Scott

• Tempest by Frances Reynolds

• A Tax on His Forbearance by Jan Ashton

• A Just and Tender Spirit by Julie Cooper

• Seven Days in Northamptonshire by Lucy Marin

• Clutter and Concealment by Nan Harrison

• Not in Vain by Mary Smythe

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