An Engagement for Christmas

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She said yes to pretending. She never said yes to falling. The Pascoes and the Trevennas have not agreed on anything since Christmas Eve, 1953. Nobody in the Cornish fishing village of Polgarrow can remember why. They only know which end of the pub to stand at. Then, at her grandmother's wake, boatbuilder and lifeboat helm Kerensa Pascoe watches ninety-three-year-old Walter Trevenna stand up in front of the whole village and make an announcement. He will give his half of the old pilchard palace on the quay — the lifeboat's home for sixty-five years — to the lifeboat, for ever. On one condition. A Pascoe and a Trevenna must be engaged to be married by Christmas Day. There is exactly one available Trevenna. Kit, a London chef with a star to his name and a return ticket, who rammed Kerensa's dinghy when they were twelve and laughed. So they get engaged. For pretend. For Walter, and the lifeboat, and a building. It will end in January, and nobody will get hurt. Except that her grandmother's will has vanished, somebody is searching her cottage by torchlight, Walter's hearing aids keep going mysteriously flat before his capacity assessment, a developer in a gilet wants the whole harbour — and Kit has been cast as the back half of the pantomime horse, with Kerensa's furious uncle in the front. And there is a storm coming on Christmas Eve. An Engagement for Christmas is a warm, funny, heart-in-your-mouth Cornish Christmas romance: a fake engagement between feuding families, a real mystery with fair clues, a village pantomime that goes gloriously wrong, and a lifeboat that has to launch when it matters most. For readers who want: • A fake engagement that stops being fake at exactly the wrong moment • Two feuding families, one very old love story, and seventy-three years of stubbornness • A real mystery — who took the will, and where did Gran hide it? • A village panto, a pantomime horse with two very unwilling halves, and a director who was in the original Cats (at the back) • Christmas on the Cornish coast, with a lifeboat, a storm, and a happy ending that has to be earned A standalone novel with a happy ending. Not everything is saved, and not everything that is lost comes back — but love wins, and the lifeboat goes out. Sensual, not explicit: love scenes are implied, never described. Mild language. A grandmother's death before the story begins; peril at sea.