The Perils of Proximity

Eight authors of Pride and Prejudice variations imagine Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet pushed into uncomfortably close quarters — by storms and sickrooms, by garden sheds and curses, by the cruel and convenient hand of fate.

A thrown letter at the bottom of a well unleashes consequences no one could have foreseen.

A riding accident leaves Darcy at the mercy of the very family he had been at such pains to avoid.

A summer storm strands him at the parsonage with the woman who has just refused his hand.

A locked garden shed becomes the unlikely scene of an even more unlikely conversation.

A fortnight at a country house party offers a second chance at the words he wishes he had never spoken.

From quiet reconciliations over a cooling cup of tea to comic disasters involving mushrooms of an inadvisable variety, from a Lydia Bennet at her most reformable to a Darcy who is anything but a gentleman of leisure, The Perils of Proximity gathers eight wholly distinct novellas united by a single,

irresistible question: What happens when there is nowhere left to go but Love?