Midsummer Magic

A warm, very funny love story about late starts, sticky beginnings, and finding home in a place you didn't plan for.

Charlotte Reid had a strategy. The bees had other ideas. After fifteen years climbing the corporate ladder at Harrods, Charlotte is done with London. She has bought a honey-coloured sweet shop in a Cotswolds village she's visited exactly twice, packed up her flat, and turned up determined to do this right. She has a strategy document. She has a five-year plan. She has a cream blouse that has, so far, survived everything.

Twenty-five hours before the grand opening, the strategy document does not survive thirty thousand bees on the front of her sign - or Tom Wakefield, the local beekeeper, who finds the whole situation very funny.

Tom keeps bees on Mrs Willoughby's land. He has hair that needs cutting, a thirteen-year-old daughter who has already worked Charlotte out, and a habit of speaking to insects in endearments. He is the calm to Charlotte's strategy, the slow afternoons to her London speed, the 'we'll see' to her 'I've planned for that'. He is also, infuriatingly, the only person in the village who knows what to do when bees turn up uninvited.

Charlotte is going to need the village.