Love Thy Neighbor

by Debbie Macomber

Overview

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber comes a classic story of love found where it's least expected...right next door!

For weeks, Lesley Brown had been counting down the days, curious and excited about the arrival of her new neighbor. With their duplex being the only house for miles, she couldn’t help but hope the new tenant would be a friend. But when she met Cole Daniels, hope turned into something far more complicated.

Cole was everything she didn’t expect—sharp-tongued, standoffish, infuriatingly cryptic. And yet, there was something about him that Lesley couldn’t ignore. Maybe it was the way he came to her rescue, then frustratingly shut her out again. Or maybe it was the secrets he so carefully guarded, secrets that practically begged to be unraveled.

Was Cole running from something, or simply keeping the world—and Lesley—at arm’s length? As their lives became increasingly tangled, she began to wonder…would the truth bring them closer, or drive an unsurmountable wedge between them?

Also by Debbie Macomber:
HEARTSONG
A GIRL LIKE JANET
UNDERCOVER DREAMER

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780369774590
Publisher:	Harlequin
Publication date:	04/28/2025
Sold by:	HARLEQUIN
Format:	eBook
File size:	999 KB

About the Author

Debbie Macomber is a #1 New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author and a leading voice in women’s fiction today. She is a multiple award winner with more than 200 million copies of her books in print. Five of her Christmas titles have been made into Hallmark Channel Original Movies, as well as a series based on her bestselling Cedar Cove stories. For more information, visit her website: www.DebbieMacomber.com.

Hometown:

Port Orchard, Washington

Date of Birth:

October 22, 1948

Place of Birth:

Yakima, Washington

Education:

Graduated from high school in 1966; attended community college

Website:

http://www.debbiemacomber.com

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest. Other times I can barely recall the exact features of his face and must bring out the photographs I keep in an old envelope in the drawer of my bedside table. There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy.

I do not see him in the mirror but feel him adjusting, as if he were twisting within a shirt that nearly fits. My father has always been intimately mysterious even when he was present. I can almost imagine how it might have been coming to him as an equal, as a friend, but not quite.

×××

My father disappeared in 1972, at the beginning of my school Christmas holiday, when I was fourteen. Mona and I were staying at the Montreux Palace, taking breakfast— I with my large glass of bright orange juice, and she with her steaming black tea—on the terrace overlooking the steel-blue surface of Lake Geneva, at the other end of which, beyond the hills and the bending waters, lay the now vacant city of Geneva. I was watching the silent paragliders hover above the still lake, and she was paging through La Tribune de Genève, when suddenly her hand rose to her mouth and trembled.

A few minutes later we were aboard a train, hardly speaking, passing the newspaper back and forth.

We collected from the police station the few belongings that were left on the bedside table. When I unsealed the small plastic bag, along with the tobacco and the lighter flint, I smelled him. That same watch is now wrapped round my wrist, and even today, after all these years, when I press the underside of the leather strap against my nostrils I can detect a whiff of him.

×××

I wonder now how different my story would have been were Mona’s hands unbeautiful, her fingertips coarse.

I still, all of these years later, hear the same childish persistence, “I saw her first,” which bounced like a devil on my tongue whenever I caught one of Father’s claiming gestures: his fingers sinking into her hair, his hand landing on her skirted thigh with the absentmindedness of a man touching his earlobe in mid-sentence. He had taken to the Western habit of holding hands, kissing, embracing in public. But he could not fool me; like a bad actor, he seemed unsure of his steps. Whenever he would catch me watching him, he would look away and I swear I could see color in his cheeks. A dark tenderness rises in me now as I think how hard he had tried; how I yearn still for an easy sympathy with my father. Our relationship lacked what I have always believed possible, given time and perhaps after I had become a man, after he had seen me become a father: a kind of emotional eloquence and ease. But now the distances that had then governed our interactions and cut a quiet gap between us continue to shape him in my thoughts.

Editorial Reviews

Like its predecessor, Anatomy of a Disappearance is studded with little jewels of perception, deft metaphors and details that illuminate character or set a scene.
—The New York Times Book Review

Robert F. Worth

Matar is an elegant writer…The resolution is too sudden and revelatory, but Anatomy of a Disappearance remains a haunting novel, exquisitely written and psychologically rich.
—The Washington Post

Ron Charles

A boy grows into a man in the suffocating vacuum of his father's abrupt and unresolved vanishing.

Though his books might seem to echo current events, it is the weight of personal history that drives the novels of Libyan author Matar (In the Country of Men, 2007). In his Booker-shortlisted debut novel, he deftly fictionalized his own experience—the author's dissident father Jaballa Matar was ruthlessly kidnapped by Egyptian secret-service agents in 1990 and imprisoned in a Libyan prison at the order of Muammar Gaddafi. In his latest, Matar portrays an even more acute sense of loss by contrasting two parental losses with the complicated relationship between a boy and his young stepmother. The narrator, Nuri Pasha, gracefully relates his story from the age of 11 to the present day. His mother, a wisp of a woman, dies early, driving Nuri and his father, an exiled political activist, together. "After she passed away he and I came to resemble two flat-sharing bachelors kept together by circumstance or obligation," Nuri muses. Their world is thrown into upheaval when Nuri's father meets 24-year-old Mona, a stunning Arab woman of English descent. Closer in age to Nuri than less-than-fatherly Kamal, Mona becomes an obsession for both father and son, adding to Kamal's confusing, furtive behavior. One winter as Nuri and Mona spend time together in Montreux, they receive word that Kamal has been abducted from the bedside of a woman in Geneva. A lesser writer might suppose that Nuri and Mona would find comfort in their communal untethering, but Matar cautiously and evocatively explores the unique and terrifying world in which Nuri finds himself. "I felt guilty, too, as I continue to feel today, at having lost him, at not knowing how to find him or take his place. Every day I let my father down."

A son without closure writes sparingly and brilliantly about what it is to suffer loss without end.

Kirkus Reviews