This Year It Will Be Different

Christmas stories from the world’s favourite storyteller

By: Maeve Binchy

Narrated by: Kate Binchy

Stories about ordinary people going about ordinary lives will always be fascinating when told by a writer blessed with extraordinary talent, insight, and compassion.

This Year It Will Be Different brings us the magic and spirit of Christmas in fifteen stories filled with Maeve Binchy's trademark wit, charm, and sheer storytelling genius. Instead of nostalgia, Binchy evokes contemporary life; instead of Christmas homilies, she offers truth; and instead of sugarplums, she brings us the nourishment of holidays that precipitate change, growth, and new beginnings. The stories in This Year It Will Be Different powerfully evoke many lives during the one holiday of the year when feelings cannot be easily hidden: step-families grappling with exes; long-married couples faced with in-law problems; a wandering husband choosing between 'the other woman' and his wife; a child caught in the grown-up tug-of-war. The time of year may be magical, imbued with personal meaning, but the situations are universal, and Maeve Binchy makes us care about them all.

Read by Kate Binchy

(p) 2007 Orion Publishing Group©2007 Maeve Binchy

Critic reviews

There's nobody like Binchy for warming the cockles, and this collection of Christmas stories warms them to white heat. (Kate Saunders)

With her gift for effortless characterisation and homely detail, she evokes power shifts in families, unwelcome discoveries, conspiracies, affairs, forgiveness, sorrow and the rebirth of optimism with her usual warmth and sympathy. (Elizabeth Buchan)

Brilliant, family-oriented short stories ... Binchy fans will love it - i did! 5/5

We are all in her pages, all of us: mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, husbands, wives, children, friends, lovers ... It is this combination of Maeve's understanding of what it is to be human, and how to cope with life, that makes her so popular (Veronica Henry)

A master storyteller (Marian Keyes)

Her storytelling ability is second to none

You can see why, for a legion of female readers, Maeve Binchy is a one-woman opiate of the people

Irish humour at its best

If you like hunourous short stories, this is a great book. I think I have pretty much read all of Maeve Binchy's books, narrated by her daughter Kate Binchy and this is a lovely lighthearted look at Christmas and all that it entails.