This Year It Will Be Different : And Other Stories » (Reprint)

As an author, Binchy's goal is simple: to let the story shine through. She told Oprah Winfrey, "I do not have a particular literary style, I am not experimental ... I tell a story and I want to share it with my readers." As a result, with her Ireland-set stories featuring strong heroines, friendship and romance, Binchy has gained quite a following since she became a bestselling author at age 43.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Circle of Friends, The Glass Lake, and Evening Class comes a stunning collection of fifteen Christmas stories filled with Maeve Binchy's trademark wit, charm, and sheer storytelling genius.  In "A Typical Irish Christmas," a grieving widower heads for a holiday in Ireland and finds an unexpected destination not just for himself, but for a father and daughter in crisis. . . .  In "Pulling Together," a teacher not yet out of her twenties sees her affair with a married man at a turning point as Christmas Eve approaches. . . .  And in the title story, "This Year It Will Be Different," a woman with a complacent husband and grown children enters a season that will forever alter her life, and theirs. . .

These stories, and a dozen more, powerfully evoke many lives—from step-families grappling with exes to children caught in grown-up tugs-of-war—during the one holiday when feelings cannot be easily hidden.  The time of year may be magical, imbued with meaning.  But the situations are timeless.  And Maeve Binchy makes us care about them all.

Publishers Weekly

That Binchy (Circle of Friends) would choose to enter the Christmas market should not be a surprise. Her wide audience enjoys the warmth of her fiction, the emphasis on the power of love to transform ordinary lives even as she acknowledges that for some people, love is elusive or the prelude to frustration and heartbreak. Here she presents 15 short stories that take place during the holiday season; all display her deft rendering of family relationships and the stresses of contemporary life. Unfortunately, however, these tales are formulaic and superficial. We meet women unable to spend Christmas with their married men, children from broken homes, aged parents for whom Christmas is an ordeal rather than a pleasure, couples trying to resolve the past, lonely souls looking for a future. Several stories feature second wives whose husbands are oblivious to the machinations of their (always beautiful but selfish) first spouses. While the characters and their predicaments are potentially interesting, as soon as her narratives begin to develop, Binchy catapults forward to disappointingly simplistic endings. Readers will yearn for more: more character development, more detail, less fast-forwarding, fewer perky or maudlin conclusions. These tales are fine for a fast read during a busy season, but many will wish that Binchy had instead developed one of them into a novel that would do justice to her characters and themes. (Nov.)