Out with Lanterns

Somerset, 1917.

Ophelia Blackwood has a choice: continue to evade a parade of her father’s ill-advised suitors, or seize control of her future and join the war effort with the Women’s Land Army. Ophelia finds camaraderie and confidence through hard work on a Somerset farm, and the independence she has always craved. But a year into her assignment, Silas Larke arrives, and she is irritated to discover that he is just as intriguing and attractive as he was during their intense summer friendship, years ago.

Injured on the front lines of World War I, Silas has spent a year convalescing, focused on returning to his work as a tenant farmer. When the British government unexpectedly assigns him to lend a hand on a local farm, he finds himself thrown together with the woman he couldn’t forget. But Ophelia has new dreams for her future, none of which include marriage. Forced to examine the future he always imagined, he will have to decide if love is worth changing all your plans for.

When pressure from the War Office raises the spectre of the farm’s repossession, should the harvest fail, the WLA women must pull together harder than ever to meet the required wheat quota. Ophelia knows she can’t afford distraction, no matter how beguiling the man, but the feelings kindled during her and Silas’s 1915 summer have returned as a blaze. Desperate to produce more for the war effort and save the farm with the people who have become her family, Ophelia and Silas push against the rising tide of their attraction, but Ophelia begins to wonder if they could be a force to be reckoned with, together.

Tropes you’ll find in
Out with Lanterns