Jane is a New Yorker to the core, city-based and career-driven. But when her teenage daughter Natalie falls in with the wrong crowd at her Manhattan school, Jane's British husband Andrew decides to relocate from new York to a small village on Britain's Cumbrian coast, buying a vast and crumbling former vicarage.

Jane hates everything about her new life: the silence, the solitude, the utter isolation. Natalie is no better, and their son Ben struggles in his new school. Even worse, Jane's difficulties create new tensions between her and Andrew. When Jane finds a scrap of an old shopping list, she becomes fascinated with Alice James, who lived in the vicarage decades before. The Vicar's Wife takes readers on an emotional journey as two very different women learn the desires of their hearts - and confront their deepest fears.