Independent
British Publisher
Midlife Romantic Fiction
Warm, funny British romantic comedy about midlife women starting over, and the unglamorous business of finding love along the way.
Pippa Kine writes about women who have built whole lives, paid the bills, raised the children, and still come undone at a well-timed smile.
Her heroines are brilliant at the unglamorous things and hopeless at the ones glossy magazines call essential. They can defuse a furious customer in thirty seconds and cannot, under any circumstances, parallel park. Pippa thinks that gap is where the best romance lives, and that the best romantic moments happen not over candlelit dinners but during shared eye-rolls.
A former retail manager who survived twenty years of customer service with her humour intact, Pippa lives in the wilds of Shropshire with her rescue dog, Loki, and the occasional visiting adult child who still mocks her parking.
The Crossed Wires series is set in Saltwick-on-Sea, a small seaside town where everyone knows your business and second chances do not come with instruction manuals. Each book follows a midlife woman starting over after divorce, widowhood, heartbreak, or simply a long stretch of insisting she is fine.
Romance arrives the awkward way: a wrong number, a crossed signal, a message sent without adequate proofreading. The misunderstandings snowball. The feelings turn up before anyone is ready. And love, in Pippa’s world, looks less like a grand declaration and more like eye contact across a kitchen table.
The School Gate series moves the warmth and the chaos to a busy London primary school, where eight parents discover that the school run leads to a great deal more than drop-off.
PTA disasters, World Book Day, and falling for someone halfway through an argument about the cake sale. The same emotional carnage as Crossed Wires, in a different postcode.
The Crossed Wires Series, Book One
Coming early 2027
Tessa Blake had a good London job and a flat she loved. At forty-three, with the job gone and the savings spent, she is back in her childhood seaside town, sleeping in her old room and supervising her mother’s knee-replacement recovery. It is temporary, she insists, while trying not to feel like a failure.
Then her mother’s landline rings. Nobody rings a landline. Tessa answers out of reflex, and a flustered, lovely voice asks for Pete’s Plumbing.
It is a wrong number. So is the second call. By the third, neither of them is pretending it is about plumbing. What follows is a romance conducted entirely down a phone line, where neither of them has the faintest idea what the other looks like. Which, for once, feels exactly right.
The first Crossed Wires novel. Warm, funny, and a little bit retro.
The School Gate Series, Book One
Coming soon
The first School Gate novel. A London primary school, eight parents, and a school run that turns out to be the start of something. Coming soon.
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