Her dream holiday is his everyday life. His dream holiday is her normal life. What happens when they collide?

Ally and her dad, Geoff, run the family business, a creative retreat, from their home Hollyhock Cottage in picturesque Kittiwake Cove. They give their guests their dream break, but Ally hankers after glamourous city living, fancy restaurants and art galleries.

Ally’s survival strategy is to escape out of season, take a break abroad and pretend to be the person she always imagined she would be. She meets Logan while she’s away and he turns out to be exactly the kind of distraction she’s looking for.

With her spirits restored, Ally returns home, picks up the reins again and sets her sights on another successful season, but when Logan unexpectedly arrives on the scene, she soon realises she’s in for a summer that’s going to be far from straightforward…

A story about bringing a holiday home – and what happens when what goes on on holiday comes back to bite you…

Heidi Swain is one of my must-read authors, I adore her books and so was eager to jump right into The Holiday Escape which is a standalone book.

The story introduces us to Ally, who lives in the beautiful coastal town of Kittiwake Cove, Dorset. She assists her father in running their family-owned holiday guest house. While she cherishes working with her dad and has a deep passion for the guest house, Ally harbours ambitions of a different life. She dreams of working in Barcelona, a dream that drives her to the point of temporarily reinventing herself when she goes abroad.

Once she has left UK soil, Ally sheds her identity, adopting a new name and crafting an entirely new persona. For one week she likes to pretend to be someone else, escaping her routine before reluctantly returning to her regular life. It is on a trip to Spain that she meets Logan and the two have a brief fling before she ghosts him, only for fate to intervene when Logan unknowingly books a stay at her guest house for the summer but their reunion is anything but joyful, especially after Logan discovers the truth about their holiday encounter.

The Holiday Escape is the perfect cosy and comforting read. It is filled with fabulous characters and a captivating plot. I adored Kittiwake Cove as much as Ally hated the place. Ally is a young woman who is torn on how she wants to live her life. Her mum died a few years ago and made her promise to help her dad and now Ally feels stuck. She is miserable living this life but she feels she can’t break the promise she made to her dying mum.

Ally’s internal conflict is heart-wrenching. She is trapped, torn between living the life she desires and keeping a promise to her late mother, hence why she likes to become someone else for a week once a year. I understood where she is coming from. I also understood why Logan, the man she met on holiday, could feel betrayed by her lies when he was vulnerable himself and really liked Ally.

Throw in a best friend, intriguing locals, and a face from the past no one is happy to see and you have a recipe for a superb read that I read in just two sittings. I adored this book. Heidi Swain has a gift for creating richly flawed, relatable characters, and vivid settings that make you wish you could step right into her world. The Holiday Escape is another testament to her ability to write truly spectacular books.

Although passionate about writing from an early age, Heidi Swain gained a degree in Literature, flirted briefly with a newspaper career, married and had two children before she finally plucked up the courage to join a creative writing class and take her literary ambitions seriously.

A lover of Galaxy bars, vintage paraphernalia and the odd bottle of fizz, she now writes contemporary fiction and enjoys the company of a whole host of feisty female characters.

Heidi can be found at the keyboard at all hours of the day and night and quite often scribbling longhand in her car during her lunch break. She lives in stunning south Norfolk with her wonderful son and daughter and a mischievous cat called Storm.