The Accidental Marriage

Elliot was taller than Nina was, but not by much, and her blocky heels gave her the inch or two needed to engage him eye to eye. "I am woman. Hear me roar. Welcome to the seventies," she said.

Standing on a Scottish tower high above the North Sea, Nina Rushforth gazed into the eyes of a lanky young man and made a big mistake—she fell in love. Six months later, she's back in Utah with a ring on her finger, standing in front of a classroom of farm kids, discussing the dangers of dangling participles.

Instead of the sophisticated life she had imagined, Nina is keeping the house in a minuscule apartment and living with a young husband who knows nothing more about being married than she does. Beset with cooking mishaps, lesson plans, and interfering in-laws, the newlyweds find themselves teetering on the brink of disaster—and neither knows know how to stop from going over the edge.

Award-winning author Annette Haws brilliantly captures the comic strife of young LDS love caught in the turbulent social crosscurrents of the 1970s. As Nina and her husband struggle with these first-year missteps, they must learn to trust the love that brought them together.

Set against Watergate, Vietnam protests, and the dawn of women's lib, this warm, witty, heartbreaking novel asks the harder question beneath the romance: not what draws two people together, but what actually keeps a marriage from falling apart.

• 'A thoughtful, and often laugh-out-loud romp'—romance that dares to ask what actually KEEPS a marriage together.
• Two people who are perfect for each other on a Scottish tower and disastrously wrong for each other in a tiny married-student apartment.
• A whip-smart heroine ahead of her time battling a 1970s good-old-boys' school—and her own new mother-in-law.
• Set at the crossroads of Watergate, Vietnam, and women's lib, when nobody knew what it meant to be a wife anymore.

“"I'm going to marry that girl," he whispered to the ruins and the wind with his arms outstretched.”

Perfect for anyone who loves realistic, character-driven fiction about marriage, identity, and the messy realities of love, rather than a tidy fairy tale.