Summary
An irresistible novel brimming with wit, warmth, and Irish humor, about the married owners of a friendly tavern in Belfast and the intimate lives of the customers and employees who band together to save it from demolition. Jack Beaumont and his beautiful wife, Lily, are the owners of the tavern on Maple Street, a tiny Victorian pub they inherited from Jack's great-uncle Ernest. It's a quiet place, untouched by the modern world, and that's why the customers like it so much. But a property developer wants to demolish the tavern and build a shopping mall on Maple Street. Jack and Lily and their little home-away-from-home are suddenly plunged into the limelight, caught in a desperate struggle to save their business from the bulldozers-or, with the help of some new employees, to at least make as much money as possible during their last few months as landlord and landlady. In The Tavern on Maple Street, Sharon Owens delivers another delicious sparkler full of love, friendship, relationships, and the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, one that is sure to satisfy readers' insatiable appetite for her romantic and quirky Belfast tales.
Natalie J. Damschroder came to writing the hard way - by avoiding it. Though she wrote her first book at age six (My Very Own Reading Book) and received accolades for her academic writing (Ruth Davies Award for Excellence in Writing for a paper on deforestation her senior year in college), she hated doing it. Colonial food and the habits of the European Starling just weren't her thing.
She found her niche - romantic fiction - shortly after college graduation. After an internship with the National Geographic Society, customer service for a phone company just wasn't that exciting. So she began learning how to write the books she'd loved to read all her life. Now she struggles to balance her frenetic writing life with her family, the most supportive husband in the world and two beautiful, intelligent, stubborn, independent daughters (the oldest of whom has become a writer). She somehow also fits in a day job and various volunteer positions in and out of the writing industry.