Valencia Expat Club

by June Patrick

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

One Italian Summer meets Eat, Pray, Love in this heartwarming novel following a recent divorcee’s escape to Spain where delicious food, romantic adventures, and the transformative magic of starting over leads her to reconnect with family, forge new friendships, and rediscover herself.

Dahlia Delaney’s marriage just imploded, her friend group picked a side (not hers), and her fancy San Francisco life now fits into a single suitcase. Armed with a broken heart, a freelance marketing gig, and one blurry childhood memory of her abuela’s garden, she impulsively hops on a flight to Valencia, Spain, to reconnect with distant family—and maybe herself.

But Valencia isn’t just sunny plazas and sangria. There’s her chaotic new job at a quirky expat bar, a family she barely knows but who embrace her like she’s always belonged, and a brooding American bar owner who’s frustratingly attractive and entirely too familiar.

As Dahlia stumbles through language mishaps, clashing cultures, and late-night paella with new friends, she begins to realize that the fresh start she came for might turn into something even better—if she can let go of the life she planned and embrace the one unfolding around her.

Perfect for anyone who’s ever dreamed of starting over somewhere with better wine, The Valencia Expat Club is a sparkling, laugh-out-loud romantic escape about second chances, delicious detours, and finding home where you least expect it.

Release date: January 6, 2026

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

Chapter 1

Chapter 1
There are exactly seventy-two ceiling tiles in Dr. Martinez’s downtown couples counseling office. I know this because I counted them three times while James explained why we should get divorced, his voice competing with the angry buzz of fluorescent lights that made everyone look like they were starring in their own personal horror film.

I’d seen it coming—had practically penciled it into my Google calendar between “Buy more coffee filters” and “Cancel joint Costco membership”—but that didn’t make it any less surreal.

I never really expected divorce to be pretty. You see the slow unraveling of marriages every day in Netflix dramas and in celebrity gossip columns. You think you know what’s coming. But the reality of it still impales you like a lance.

James wasn’t wrong. We should be getting divorced. But that didn’t change the fact that it made me feel like an utter failure. What kind of overachiever fails at a marriage at thirty?

Now, three months and twenty-seven passive-aggressive exchanges later, I sat at my home coffee table, staring at final divorce papers while trying not to cry into my fourth cup of coffee. The mug said “Best Wife Ever”—a white elephant gift from James’s office Christmas party last year. What a fun little joke.

But that was just how life went, wasn’t it? The realities rarely match our expectations. Honestly, I think our marriage had been unraveling since the ink dried on the license—the threads of connection fraying one by one like my favorite college sweater I refuse to throw away. Our nights grew quieter. The distance between us in bed stretched wider than the San Andreas Fault. My silk pajamas gathered dust in the drawer, replaced by shapeless T-shirts that matched the apathy settling over our home like Bay Area fog. The laughter stopped. The charming anecdotes became obnoxiously redundant.

Finally, we faced the truth. No babies to bind us. No major assets complicating things. No love to renew us. The next thing we knew, we were arguing over who got to keep the good ladle.

I sighed, looking around the room. I was going to miss this house more than my actual marriage. We’d gotten lucky and managed to snag a little town house across from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park when the registered sex offender renting it had died in the back bedroom, and the owner couldn’t give it away. (Hey, in this housing market, you take what you can get, even if it comes with a questionable history and the occasional unexplained creak.)

We’d turned the cozy hamlet of blue paint with a brick fireplace tucked away in the eucalyptus into a home. But now I resisted the urge to pull up the Zillow listing. The idea that it was on the market was too painful to stomach.

But neither of us could afford to buy the other out at the current market value. So our lawyers thought it best we sell and take our wins. At least the market was up, and once it sold, I’d have a little nest egg. I sighed. It would probably be too depressing living here anyway, surrounded by the ghosts of failure.

“Focus, Dahlia,” I muttered, pushing aside the papers to stare at my laptop screen. The marketing campaign for artisanal dog treats wasn’t going to write itself, and those divorce therapy sessions definitely weren’t paying for themselves. But my brain kept circling back to the fact that I was about to be just another statistic, another ex–Mrs. Something, stepping into an unexpected future with nothing but a collection of self-help books and an iron mermaid bottle opener I fought way too hard to keep. I was beginning to think what I thought was happiness was really just an easy contentment. An arrangement that was simple enough to sink into and build a day-to-day life that made sense on paper.

Grr. There was no way I could focus.

I abandoned my laptop—sorry, bougie dog treats—and wandered into the living room, where moving boxes formed a cardboard city of shattered dreams.

Memories of happier times flickered briefly, only to be overshadowed by the present emptiness. James had the decency to check into an Airbnb until we sorted out the living arrangements. How magnanimous.

Desperate for a distraction, I pulled a box from the closet I’d been meaning to sort through. I’d mostly packed everything for the real estate staging, but I had a few remaining boxes to go through. One upside to turning your life inside out is the chance to purge a bit. It’s amazing how much detritus a life can collect—school papers, birthday cards, kitschy knickknacks from weekends in Vegas.

Inside one box, I found an old photo album Mom gave me when I left for college, back when I thought I had life figured out. Like most things from that era—including my questionable dedication to Forever 21 bandage dresses—I was spectacularly wrong. I smiled, running my hand over the worn, genuine leather. I delicately opened and turned the pages, laughing at a chunky baby Dahlia with rubber band wrists and sporting probably the worst floral dress I’d ever seen.

I smiled as memories graced the pages—Disneyland and summer pool days. Awkward middle school dances—okay, seriously, who was monitoring my fashion choices?

Then my fingers traced over a photo that made my heart squeeze: six-year-old me in my grandmother’s garden in Valencia, Spain, both of us covered in dirt and smiling like we’d discovered buried treasure instead of just planting tomatoes. Abuela’s garden was a maze of herbs and vegetables, where she taught me that the best things in life take time to grow.

“Como las plantas, mi amor,” she’d say, “relationships need tending.”

I had no idea what she was talking about then, but it made sense now. I guess James and I weren’t much of gardeners.

A wave of grief lapped over me. When I was little, Mom and I would take trips to Valencia, where her mother’s family was from. But I hadn’t been back since I was ten—the year my world crumbled. Abuela had come out to see me a couple of times, but nearly three years had gone by since I’d last seen her before she suddenly passed away when I was eighteen. The guilt had been eating me ever since.

The sound of a text notification jolted me from my nostalgia spiral. It was my colleague and recently acquired bestie, Cora: Stop overthinking and sign the damn papers. Then get dressed. We’re going out tonight.

We’d been friendly for a few years but had never hung out much—I had my circle with James; she had her own world. Then, one day six months ago, she pulled me aside after a pitch meeting for a company selling robot-powered smoothie machines.

“I know we’re not exactly close, but you look—different. Sad. Are you—okay?” she’d said.

I looked her in the eye and burst into tears. I then confessed all like a drunken taxicab confession.

I looked down at my oversize Nirvana T-shirt—the one with the mysterious stain that might be pizza sauce or evidence of a crime—and sighed. Cora was right. It was time to close this chapter.

My pen hovered over the signature line. One stroke, and I’d no longer be Mrs. Hill. Just Dahlia Delaney again, stepping into an unexpected future with a secondhand heart.

I suppose “till death do us part” should’ve come with an asterisk: Results may vary. Forever not guaranteed. Side effects may include questioning everything you thought you knew about love while shoveling Halo Top Mint Chip into your mouth at 3 a.m.

But maybe that’s okay. Maybe sometimes you have to let the story you thought you were writing turn into something else entirely. Like Abuela’s garden, you have to clear out the dead things to make room for new growth.

Hill was a boring name, anyway.

Wow, those self-help books were really paying off.

I signed the papers.

Then I texted Cora back: Fine, but I’m not wearing heels. And you’re buying the first round.

If I had to start over, I might as well do it with good wine and better company.

But first, I needed to figure out how to make artisanal dog treats sound life-changing. A girl’s got to pay her therapy bills somehow.