Lilian Darcy: Love, loss and latté…

Café du Jour, my all-time “book of the heart” is about to launch on Amazon Kindle™!

Everyone is talking about the wildfire growth of e-books now that their reading platforms have become so much better and cheaper. Superstar authors such as Nora Roberts are hitting the million mark in e-book sales. Everyone got a Kindle for Christmas. It feels like a bumper Christmas for authors like me, as well. Finally, stories we’ve placed so much faith in over the years, but that don’t fit into our mainstream publishers’ marketing plans can find their readership.

Café du Jour has been such an important book for me. I wrote the first draft before my first child was born, and that’s twenty-one years ago. It received a publication offer from a successful Australian publisher back then, but their New Fiction publishing program was cancelled before the book could appear.

For years it sat in that place all writers know, the bottom drawer full of old unpublished manuscripts, reworked and tweaked, updated and added to, loved and hated in turn. The characters stayed with me and grew as I matured and changed. A great agent loved the story and signed me up on the strength of it. A Harlequin editor said to me, “I love this book. I really want to find a home for it at Harlequin.”

But it was hard. The book didn’t quite fit into their existing programs. It was too quirky, too bitter-sweet. Finally it was published by the Australian division of Mira, Harlequin’s major single title imprint. It sold respectably, and received some great feedback and reviews, but went out of print all too soon.

Now I have the rights back, I’m putting Café du Jour out as an e-book, and I’m so happy that readers will have a chance to discover it, and maybe find in it something of the meaning and emotion that it has for me, the same kind of meaning and emotion I’m putting into my new fictional blog at www.liliandarcy.com/blog  I hope some of you will stop by there and enjoy a glimpse into the life of my fictional alter ego, Liz Davenport, and her large, messy family.

Meanwhile, here’s a little more about Café du Jour to whet your appetite:

“If today is a cup of coffee it has to be a big, piping hot café au lait, served in a bowl the way they often do in France. I drink it with my hands curved around the bowl for warmth… and for safety…”

Susie used to have the perfect sister, the perfect boss, the perfect restaurant kitchen to cook in and a man who only needed a tweak or two. Now, everything is changing and all she can do is take it one sip at a time.

“I loved this book!” - Jane Porter, best-selling author of Flirting With Forty and She’s Gone Country

“Warm and witty… an excellent read.” - Dianne Dempsey in The Melbourne Age newspaper