Published By: Boldwood
Pages: 360
Released On: 22/11/2025
After a gruelling few years in city hospitals, trainee doctor Alice hopes a new, small-town post will bring quiet to her racing mind. Instead, she finds a place brimming with eccentricity and curiosity, and people who seem to see straight through her carefully controlled facade.
Murray has returned to his hometown with a broken heart and his tail between his legs. Volunteering at the family-run repair shop is meant to be temporary… until a chance encounter starts to crack his emotional armour.
Meanwhile, mountain ranger Finlay lives for solitude and the wild and rugged scenery. But when a broken compass draws him reluctantly into town life, he finds himself pulled not just into a community project, but into the kind of tangled feelings he’s spent a lifetime avoiding.
As a new garden is built and winter weather rages, lives will be patched, polished and set on entirely new courses. Can these lonely hearts be mended, and finally find happiness and love?
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Boldwood for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I love Kiley’s books and I loved the first installment in this series, Fixing a Broken Heart at the Highland Repair Shop.
I haven’t yet found a book of Kiley’s I haven’t loved, but for some reason, I really struggled with this one. Normally I can read her books in a couple of hours but I had to plough through this one, forcing myself.
There were three narratives and I think that was too many. I know 3 is not a lot and I can normally keep up with far more, but I just kept getting confused here, and I couldn’t invest as much in the characters because there just seemed to be so many. It got better as it went along but I probably spent at least the first quarter having to really think and flick back to figure out who was who and how they related.
I don’t think I’ve ever given her books anything less than a 4.5/5, but like I say, I found this one really hard work and I hate saying that because she’s normally a go-to author for cosyness and happiness.
I generally don’t mind books that have difficult subjects or show a more negative aspect to life, because that’s reality, and it makes the most uplifting bits shine more. But this just dragged me down and I needed more of her normal cheeriness to get me through it.
It’s so weird because book one was fantastic and I loved it so much that I already had the sequels earmarked on my wishlist. And so it seems strange to go from that high to this one. I can’t say it’s bad because it’s not. There’s just too many characters, too many subplots, not enough emotion to invest in, and just felt ab it bland sadly.
Books By Your Bedside 