Anne Freeman - Returning to Adelaide

Adelaide Jones is about to taste the sweet life. Raising her 5-year-old twins is getting easier and her husband, Joe, is selling his IT company for an ungodly sum. Then, it all begins to implode. Not only are her closest friends facing insurmountable challenges but the rock of her own marriage is crumbling.

Could her quest to be indispensable to her husband have rendered her invisible instead?

When Alec, an unrequited love from the past, invites her to the Greek Islands, she flees on a whim. Here in Ikaria, with bass beating in time with her heart, she isn’t a wife or mother, just a woman thrust into a strange new world.

But when her feelings for Alec reignite, despite his burgeoning love affair with world-famous house act DJ Allora, Adelaide redirects her attention to local bartender Xena and the exquisite artisanal embroidery her family produce.

It’s been years since the beauty of textiles has stirred these feelings in her and she’s startled to realise just how far off course her life has veered. But even in paradise things aren’t always what they seem and Adelaide finds herself deeply enmeshed in the lives of her new friends.

Just as Adelaide is succumbing to old passions and getting reacquainted with the promising woman she once was, responsibility comes calling. Now she has to stop trying to solve everyone else’s problems and face the tatters of her own life.

She returns home to find her world inexorably altered and is forced to question the veracity of some long-held beliefs, making way for the emergence of an unlikely ally.

Can she muster the courage to build the life she always dreamed of or will she succumb to her stifling sense of duty and the convenience of an unexpected opportunity?