If Kissing Abbi has been sitting at the back of your mind, this is your final nudge. ARCs go out tomorrow!
Don’t miss out on this tender, love story about two married women in a small Michigan town who become each other’s whole world, and about the quiet, terrifying question underneath it: what if the life you built is not the life you actually want, and what if it is not too late to change it.
It is warm and hopeful even as it holds heavy things. If you want to read it before release day and help set the tone for how this debut lands, this is the window.
Anna has spent twenty years being the person who notices everyone else. Who is tired, who has gone quiet, who needs a second cup of coffee before anyone speaks to them. Then Abbi moves into her orbit, and for the first time in longer than she can remember, someone notices her back.
They are both married. They are both mothers. They both live inside the same quiet arrangement so many women will recognise: a marriage that looks fine from the outside and has gone cold somewhere in the middle. And between the school runs and the grocery lists and the slow work of an ordinary life, the two of them become each other’s whole world.
Anna Pivato is a first-time author, and this is a story she wrote close to the bone. She wrote it, in her own words, to say that it is never too late to build the life you were meant to be living, no matter how impossible that feels from the inside of the one you already have. You can feel that conviction on every page.
Title: Kissing Abbi: An Unconventional Love Story
Author: Anna Pivato
Genre: WLW Contemporary / Women’s Fiction
ARC Sendout: 11 August 2026
Release Date: 25 August 2026
🌈 WLW romance
📖 Women’s fiction
🏳️🌈 LGBTQ+
🌱 Midlife reinvention
🪞 Narcissism
💔 Divorce
🔁 Second chances
The most unexpected love can be the hardest to deny.
Kissing Abbi: An Unconventional Love Story is an intimate, emotionally honest novel about two women whose growing friendship forces them to question the traditional lives they’re leading—married to men they no longer love. Set in a small town and shaped by emotional distance, narcissism, and a life-altering cancer diagnosis, the story follows Anna and Abbi as their unexpected connection deepens into something neither woman anticipated, nor feels prepared to embrace. Told through alternating perspectives, the novel blends domestic realism with emotional depth, capturing the quiet, powerful pull of unexpected love that arrives at the most complicated time.
As both women navigate marriage, motherhood, illness, and societal expectations, they are confronted with difficult truths about loyalty, authenticity, and the courage required to pursue a truer, happier version of themselves. Warm and confessional in tone—balancing Anna’s wry self-awareness with Abbi’s practical vulnerability—Kissing Abbi is a bittersweet exploration of love, loss, and midlife reinvention. Inspired by an unquestionably complicated, unexpectedly beautiful true story.
Kissing Abbi is emotionally heavy women’s fiction. It contains terminal illness and the on-page decline and death of a spouse from cancer, including hospice scenes; emotional abuse and narcissistic behaviour within a marriage; the strain of a failing long-term marriage, and divorce; references to a past spouse’s infidelity; the off-page death of a teenager in a car accident, and a serious car accident later in the story; grief, guilt, and the experience of no longer loving a dying spouse; the impact of parental divorce and remarriage on children; a midlife same-sex awakening and the fear of coming out to children, parents, and community; and brief explicit sexual content between two women, along with some strong language. The overall tone is warm and hopeful rather than bleak, but the illness, grief, and marital-abuse threads run throughout.
Anna Pivato is a first-time author whose life took a few unexpected turns in leading to where she is now: happily married to the woman who quickly became her best friend. The middle-aged mother of three felt compelled to share her story in the hopes of convincing others that it’s never too late to pursue the life you’re meant to be living, no matter how impossible it may seem. Pivato’s honest, often humorous tone tugs at the reader’s heartstrings, as she celebrates the unexpected beauty of midlife reinvention, renewal, and recognizing one’s own worth at any stage of life.
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