The Love Letter

Book excerpt: A bookseller is obsessed with a mysterious love note in the New York Times–bestselling author’s “sophisticated and witty valentine of a novel” (People). Intelligent, sexy, and fortyish, Helen MacFarquhar is a woman in control of her life and everyone in it—until an anonymous love letter falls into her hands one summer morning. Helen has been leading a blissful existence as the proprietor of a small bookstore in a quaint New England seaside town. She beguiles her customers into buying the titles she recommends, and flirts shamelessly with nearly every one of the town’s eccentric residents. But Helen’s self-confidence falters when the love letter arrives in her mail. “How do you fall in love?” the letter asks, and the question becomes Helen’s obsession, in this “smart, moving, and funny” (Detroit Free Press) story by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Three Weissmanns of Westport and They May Not Mean To, But They Do.