Poppyland, By Raffaella Barker

Raffaella Barker's latest warm-hearted romance opens with a modern-day brief encounter. Grace, a young English artist, is in Copenhagen for the opening of her first solo show. Taking a walk down to the city's docks she bumps into Ryder, a tall, rugged stranger who appears from nowhere out of the nordic night.

Fast-forward several years later, and Grace is living in New York with a wealthy oil executive. Her work is flourishing but her relationship is cooling quicker than a hot bath. On the other side of the Atlantic, Ryder, a marine engineer with an unsettled love life, can't get Copenhagen out of his mind. How the lonesome twosome find their way back home lies at the heart of Barker's narrative.

Like many novelists, Barker is a therapist manqué, and there is much clued-up analysis of Grace and Ryder's psychological states. It soon emerges that what they have in common is loss: Grace is still reeling from her mother's recent death; Ryder has never recovered from the tragic accident that killed his teenage sister. Both malcontents are terrified of facing middle-age alone, yet seemingly just as terrified to pick up the phone and call one another.

It takes Grace's older sister, Lucy, a happily married mother of two, to make the connection. Inviting Grace back to Norfolk for a family christening, she inadvertantly sets the stage for a dreamy midsummer reunion.

Marrying the cliches and coincidences of chick-lit to lush literary prose, Barker's novel comes into its own with its vivid evocation of the Norfolk coast.