I always imagined myself as Anne Shirley. Partly because of my name. I’m Anne (with an E) Gallagher. And my hair is red, thanks to a box of Red Hot hair color I found under the bathroom sink. Plus, I grew up on an island—Mackinac Island, Michigan, which has its own tiny school and horse-drawn carriages and streets lined with Victorian houses. Total nostalgic charm vibes. It’s like living in a storybook. Like, literally. Like, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES.
photo credit rboed, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Honestly, I loved growing up here. They passed some law back in the 1890s banning automobiles, so there are no cars. I rode my bike everywhere. In winter, we rode snowmobiles to school and played hockey in the middle of the frozen Main Street.
When I was a kid, sometimes Dad would take me to the Mustang Lounge after he finished work. I’d suck pop through a straw, my legs dangling from a bar stool, feeling grown-up and special, while he ordered a beer he never finished.
photo credit https://www.mustanglounge.online/gallery
The island library’s kind of small, but there’s a long table in the middle where you can read and chairs pulled up to the fireplace and a really cute kids’ area. There are Adirondack chairs on the back porch overlooking the straits. It’s the perfect place to read or dream. The water sparkles, and the air smells like fudge and horses.
photo credit Tracy Brogan https://www.tracybrogan.com/
So, yeah, I loved it. But I can’t say I planned to come back. Until my dad died, and things went sideways with my teaching job because the principal doesn’t like my classroom library, and my boyfriend…Well. We don’t have to go into that.
Anyway, I’m home. Just for the summer, to help my mom out in her fudge shop. Mom is Maddie’s Candie’s on Main Street, and during the season, she gets slammed with tourists.
photo credit n8huckins, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Not that my mother would ever say she needs my help. But maybe, with Dad gone, I need to feel needed. And it will be good to connect with my childhood best friend, Daanis. We used to dream of moving to New York together. I was going to become a famous writer, and she would sell her paintings on the sidewalk. Instead, she married her stupid high school sweetheart, and I’m…figuring things out. But kindred spirits forever, right?
Less than six hundred people live on the island year-round, which means we’re all really close. Maybe too close? Everybody knows everybody and nobody ever forgets the stupid things you did. Joe Miller—my childhood nemesis and Dad’s business partner—used to call me the Pest. Everybody thinks I’m still little Annie Gallagher, who stared out the window and talks too much and wore her rain boots on the wrong feet in kindergarten, and I’m not that girl anymore.
No matter what Joe Miller says.
ANNE OF A DIFFERENT ISLAND by Virginia Kantra
Narrator: Will Collyer, Kathleen McInerney
A woman learns to be the heroine of her own life in this heartfelt novel inspired by Anne of Green Gables by New York Times bestselling author Virginia Kantra.
She believed life could follow a plotline—until the story she was living unraveled.
Anne Gallagher has always lived by the book. Anne of Green Gables, that is. Growing up on Mackinac Island, she saw herself as her namesake: the same impulsive charm, the same wild imagination, even the same red hair (dyed, but still). She followed in Anne Shirley’s fictional footsteps, chasing dreams of teaching and writing, and falling for her very own storybook hero.
But when a string of real-life plot twists—a failing romance, a fight with the administration, and the sudden death of her beloved father—pulls her back to the island she once couldn’t wait to leave, Anne is forced to face a truth no story ever prepared her for. Sometimes, life doesn’t follow a script.
Back in the house she grew up in, Anne must confront her past and the people she left behind, including Joe Miller, the boy who once called her “The Pest.” It’s time to figure out what she wants and rewrite her story to create her own happy ending. Not the book version. The real one.
Thriller Domestic | Women’s Fiction Friendship [ Berkley, On Sale: January 20, 2026, Trade Paperback / e-Book / audiobook, ISBN: 9780593816493 / eISBN: 9780593816509 ]
Buy ANNE OF A DIFFERENT ISLAND: Amazon.com | Kindle | BN.com | Apple Books | Kobo | Google Play | Books-A-Million | Indie BookShops | Ripped Bodice | Libro.fm | Audible | Walmart.com | Amazon CA | Amazon UK | Amazon DE | Amazon FR
About Virginia Kantra
New York Times bestselling author Virginia Kantra is the author of almost thirty novels. Her stories have earned numerous awards including two Romance Writers of America’s RITA® Awards, ten RITA® nominations, and two National Readers’ Choice Awards. Carolina Dreaming, the fifth book in her Dare Island series, won the 2017 RITA® Award for Best Contemporary Romance – Midlength and was named one of BookPage’s Top Ten Romance Novels of 2016.
Virginia is married to her college sweetheart, a coffee shop owner who keeps her well supplied with caffeine and material. They make their home in North Carolina, where they raised three (mostly adult) children. She is a firm believer in the strength of family, the importance of storytelling, and the power of love.
Her favorite thing to make for dinner? Reservations.
No Comments
Comments are closed.