Rural Affairs Drayton Beauchamp Series Paperback

Whoever said life in the country was boring... Alicia's a smart sassy lawyer who won't stand for any nonsense. She lives for payday, Prada and becoming a Partner of the firm. Having shaken the proverbial rural dust of Drayton Beauchamp off her Jimmy Choos, she knows exactly what she wants out of life. At least, until one disastrous summer, she thinks she does. Then, stuck back in the village she grew up in things start to get complicated as she rediscovers old friends, Matty the farmer's wife with a passion for fashion and Chloe, the eternal romantic. As she clashes with her mother's favourite gardener, deals with aggressive clients and sees her friend's marriage fall apart, she finds that she becomes inexplicably bound to the village. However much she tries to leave it appears fate has other plans. Whoever said life in the countryside was boring couldn't have been more wrong; there's always a rural affair.

Whoever said life in the country was boring... Alicia's a smart sassy lawyer who won't stand for any nonsense. She lives for payday, Prada and becoming a Partner of the firm. Having shaken the proverbial rural dust of Drayton Beauchamp off her Jimmy Choos, she knows exactly what she wants out of life. At least, until one disastrous summer, she thinks she does. Then, stuck back in the village she grew up in things start to get complicated as she rediscovers old friends, Matty the farmer's wife with a passion for fashion and Chloe, the eternal romantic. As she clashes with her mother's favourite gardener, deals with aggressive clients and sees her friend's marriage fall apart, she finds that she becomes inexplicably bound to the village. However much she tries to leave it appears fate has other plans. Whoever said life in the countryside was boring couldn't have been more wrong; there's always a rural affair.

Life is never dull in Drayton Beauchamp but for Zoe it feels as though her world has been turned upside down. As her elderly employer is rushed off to hospital and the dog rescue centre is set to close, she doesn't think it can get much worse... Until a city developer and his girlfriend turn up and threaten to build a new housing estate on the beloved allotments. With the village up in arms and the tensions rising, Zoe finds herself plunged into the centre of the controversy with some dramatic unforeseen consequences. Everything falls apart but, luckily, it turns out a dog really is a girl's best friend.

How ordinary Americans, frustrated by the legal and political wrangling over the Second Amendment, can fight for reforms that will both respect gun owners’ rights and reduce gun violence. Efforts to reduce gun violence in the United States face formidable political and constitutional barriers. Legislation that would ban or broadly restrict firearms runs afoul of the Supreme Court’s current interpretation of the Second Amendment. And gun rights advocates have joined a politically savvy firearm industry in a powerful coalition that stymies reform. Ian Ayres and Fredrick Vars suggest a new way forward. We can decrease the number of gun deaths, they argue, by empowering individual citizens to choose common-sense gun reforms for themselves. Rather than ask politicians to impose one-size-fits-all rules, we can harness a libertarian approach—one that respects and expands individual freedom and personal choice—to combat the scourge of gun violence. Ayres and Vars identify ten policies that can be immediately adopted at the state level to reduce the number of gun-related deaths without affecting the rights of gun owners. For example, Donna’s Law, a voluntary program whereby individuals can choose to restrict their ability to purchase or possess firearms, can significantly decrease suicide rates. Amending Red Flag statutes, which allow judges to restrict access to guns when an individual has shown evidence of dangerousness, can give police flexible and effective tools to keep people safe. Encouraging the use of unlawful possession petitions can help communities remove guns from more than a million Americans who are legally disqualified from owning them. By embracing these and other new forms of decentralized gun control, the United States can move past partisan gridlock and save lives now.