The Setup

From the author of The Summer Job comes a laugh-out-loud, heartwarming story about one woman's impulsive fib that jump starts a summer of reinvention and learning about love, life, and what it means to accept yourself.


It's fate. Or did she set the whole thing up?

The last place average thirty-one-year-old Mara Williams thought she'd be is on a solo vacation impersonating her fortune teller. Then Joe, a handsome Austrian cellist sits down for a reading and before she knows it, she's telling him his destiny will be sitting in a pub in the English seaside town of Broadgate on the last Friday of June. And more specifically, her name is Mara.

Enter Project Mara: four months to turn herself into the sophisticated, confident woman she's always wanted to be before the universe delivers "the one." Meanwhile the crumbling, formerly glamorous beachside pool club where she works is under threat and her eccentric colleagues enlist her help to save it, just as her new housemate, Mike, proves to be more than she bargained for. Can Mara pull off the transformation of the summer? And what if true love is closer to home than she thinks?