Jeanne, an Aga is a solid fuel cooker that usually has 2 or 4 ovens and two plates on the top that are permanently hot. When I was a child, you found them in farmhouses and old kitchens, but these days they are huge status symbols and found in every 'yummy mummy's' home. They are lovely for warming a kitchen, but they cost a small fortune to run.
Joanna Trollope's novels were called 'aga sagas' because they were largely about comfortably-off, middle-class, families either living in country houses or with second homes in the country. They were/are not chick lit, they were more about the angst of financially stable youngish couples, their marriages, divorces, affairs, etc. In one of them, a vicar's wife takes a job in a supermarket to pay her daughter's school fees. They're good stories.
Rosemary