Driven by curiosity and possibility, writer Bella Pollen has always maintained a double life, navigating between a fierce love of family and the yearning for escape until one day, a strange encounter changes everything . . .

What does it take to work out who you really are and where you truly belong? From mafia-in-laws to fashion failures to neighbours from hell, Pollen’s search for answers is a dazzling and powerful odyssey through the conflicting desires and roles of women in today’s confusing world. Interwoven with passages of graphic art by award-winning illustrator Kate Boxer, Meet Me in the In-between is a renegade memoir that takes readers all over the world before bringing them back home again.

A Richard and Judy Book Club selection. The Summer of the Bear is a beautiful story of a family recovering from loss on a remote Scottish island, from Bella Pollen, author of Hunting Unicorns. In the summer of 1979, a tamed grizzly bear is tempted by the lure of freedom and the wild open sea . . . Meanwhile, the sudden death of British diplomat Nicky Fleming has left his wife closed down with shock. Relocated from Cold-War-riven Germany to a remote Hebridean island, Letty Fleming is haunted by the unthinkable - was it an accident, murder or suicide? And how can she ever begin to explain to her three children that their father may have betrayed his country? Struggling to find solace in a place she loves, Letty begins to unravel the mystery of Nicky's death, but her determination to protect the children from the truth blinds her to the demons they are already battling. As the family's secrets threaten to tear them apart, it is only the strange but brilliant Jamie who manages to hold on to the one thing he knows for sure: his father has promised to return, and Nicky Fleming was a man who never broke a promise . . .

Bella Pollen, a best-selling British author who lives part-time in the American Southwest, is the author of Hunting Unicorns, which was a smash success in the UK, where it was selected as a Best Summer Read by the Richard and Judy Show (the Oprah of England). In that novel she took an American journalist to London with romantic and comedic results. In her new book, Pollen places a British mother of two in a tiny abandoned mining town on the Mexican border of Arizona and spins a romantic and dangerous story about betrayal and freedom against the backdrop of immigration politics. Needing a respite from her claustrophobic marriage in London, Alice Coleman moves her two small children to the Arizona desert with the intention of renovating the abandoned village her husband acquired in a failed business scheme--and there escapes to a solitude she craves and hadn't thought possible. But the vast and unruly Southwest has room for the dreams of more than one fugitive. In this dusty, alien atmosphere everyone has something to hide--from Benjamin, the town's Mexican caretaker, to the immigrants who risk their lives to cross the border, to the laconic cowboy Duval, whom Alice finds herself falling for. As winter moves to scorching summer, what seemed idyllic turns deadly as Alice is drawn deeper into an obsessive quest for revenge until finally she must decide how much she is willing to sacrifice in order to preserve not only her freedom, but Benjamin and Duval's as well. A compelling and perilous love story, Midnight Cactus explores the tensions between unrealized dreams and the pull of family. In a blistering climax, Alice discovers it is only by risking everything that one learns what is reallyworth living for.

American Maggie Monroe is a journalist for New York's hard-hitting current affairs show Newsline. Independent and fearless, the more cutting-edge the story, the happier she is. But when her next assignment turns out to be an in-depth documentary on the decline of England's ruling classes, she's furious at being sent to cover a bloody tea party. Meet the Earl and Countess of Bevan, eccentric, maddening and with family secrets to hide. Meet Daniel Bevan - their eldest son. Funny, attractive and hopelessly alcoholic. Meet Daniel's responsible brother Rory - angry, self-mocking and strictly teetotal. When Maggie discovers Rory to be an uninvited chaperone on the first stop of her journey the two look set to clash. Maggie finds herself torn between her journalist ideals and coming to terms with a greater understanding. This unlikely romantic comedy paints an endearing portrait of a family, which like so many others, holds itself together despite its evident frailties. 'Hilariously accurate . . . A gifted writer with a pithy, poetic style' Wendy Holden, Daily Mail

Interwoven with exquisite passages of graphic memoir, Meet Me in the In-Between is bestselling author Bella Pollen's surprisingly tender, frequently funny and achingly poignant quest to keep on looking for the extraordinary in an ordinary life. Growing up the middle child of transatlantic parents, Bella Pollen never quite learnt how to belong. Restlessly criss-crossing the boundaries of family and freedom, safety and danger, home and away, she has sought but generally failed to contain an adventurous spirit within the narrow lines of convention - until, finding herself stymied in the in-between, she reluctantly concludes that to move forwards, she must take a good look at her past. Cue a bewitching journey, from her very English childhood in upper Manhattan, through an early marriage to the son of an alluring Italian Godfather, to the dusty border towns of Mexico where she falls in with a band of Pink Floyd-loving smugglers. Throughout all, Pollen grapples with relationships, motherhood, career ups and downs and a pathological fear of being boxed in.