THE BALLROOM CAFE VIDEO

Please take a minute to look at this beautiful video from Black&White Publishing which highlights such lovely reviews for The Ballroom Café. I am so grateful to all the lovely readers who are keeping The Ballroom Café at the top of the Amazon kindle rankings, where it is currently  hovering between #10 and #13. Thank you all.

THE BALLROOM CAFE - ONE FOR THE SHELF.

All these words are heavy in my hands. The cover is embossed with flowers; the spine thick and strong. The Ballroom Café arrived in the post today. To finally hold the novel in the palm of my hands is both overwhelming and tremendously exciting.

 With my finger I trace the words, The Ballroom Café; the title I thought up a long time ago as I wrote in my kitchen early in the morning, only the dawn chorus as company.

The Ballroom Cafe, I sound it out; it trips off my tongue happily the tag line 'Secrets Can't Last Forever' hinting at something deeper, maybe darker.

How could all my words come together in to something so beautiful? In our house when we love a book, we can't bear to let it go, we say it is one for the shelf.

The Ballroom Cafe will take pride of place on the shelf. I hope you will want to make a space for it on yours.

And ...

Pull up a chair and enjoy The Ballroom Cafe, now open to the world.

Allow me to invite you to  The Ballroom Café. Pull up a chair and enjoy the story. If you have time please read the acknowledgments, where I pay tribute to my late mother and father who fostered a love of learning, books and storytelling in all of us children. It was not unusual to come home from school and see my mother stirring a big pot of stew; a Dickens novel  propped against the bread bin, so she could stir and read. A good book, she said was a friend for life, which could be revisited many times without a formal invitation; a friend capable of raising you up , even in the toughest times. The best books, she used to say had characters you secretly hoped to meet on the street on any ordinary day.

It is E-Book publication day! 

Welcome to the world of Roscarbury Hall, Rathsorney village and The Ballroom Café where tea is served in china cups Ella O'Callaghan's mother had once displayed proudly in her china cabinet. 

This is one of my favourite. 

Thank you to all those readers who have already helped push The Ballroom Café in to the Amazon Top 100, where it currently sits at  #11.

        Flowers, vintage Weiss and childhood memories

Just eleven days until The Ballroom Café meets the world as an e-book. The sun is shining and the daisies are pushing their way between the dandelions and buttercups. 
    When I was young I loved to wander the green meadows around our family home. We jumped streams, played hide and seek in the woods, but our favourite on a sunny summer day was to lie on the flat of our backs in a grassy meadow full of wild flowers. There among the cowslips, buttercups, blue cornflowers, clover, daisies and grasses we looked to the clouds, giving them names and attaching stories to each.
Cumulus clouds full of memories remain now of lazy sunny days when we had time to watch the pillows of white  change shape, as the flowers bowed and touched our faces.

  We stayed like that until my mother called us for dinner, her voice lifting like a song  across the fields. We always ignored the first call, staying hidden among the flowers and grass, but she never had to call a third time. When we came to the table she always sighed and said "I don't know what you do out in those fields all day."
  These Weiss brooches, loved by Ella O'Callaghan in The Ballroom Café bring back such lovely memories.