What if you had the chance to revisit every choice that mattered?

Sabrina Sorensen is 37, single, and just lost a fabulous job as manager of a posh Parisian restaurant. She heads home to California for her younger sister’s engagement party, and it’s an open door for her mother and siblings to chide Sabrina for her inability to commit to any of her previous jobs and relationships. What they don’t know is that Sabrina, for fifteen long years, has been building her résumé in hopes of becoming an inspector for the famed MICHELIN guides—a path that has required keeping her ambitions hidden, even from her family. And, with the job loss, all she’s worked for is in jeopardy. After her mother’s final clumsy attempt to fix her up with the charming “boy next door,” Sabrina leaves the party and retreats to the Burbank Airport.

The problem? She has nowhere to go.

She arrives at the airport, resolved to put the family conflict behind her and focus on her work, but now her mother’s critical voice fills her with doubts. Has she been wasting her life? Faced with the enormity of her next decision, Sabrina breaks down at the ticket counter. The ticket agent pulls her aside and offers her the life-altering opportunity to revisit some of her key life choices, both personal and professional. Sabrina suddenly is given the rare chance to answer the burning question: has she been foolish to sacrifice so much for her dream of becoming a Michelin inspector? And will a spark with an aspiring Danish chef change her priorities altogether?

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Unraveling the tangled roots of her family takes her places she never expected.

Veronica Stratton, a specialty food broker with a business on the cusp of brilliant success that would change the trajectory of her life, visits her parents in idyllic Estes Park for Christmas. She’s fresh from a breakup with her longtime boyfriend, so she’s eager to reconnect with her beloved family in the mountains and forget about her troubles for a few days. But with the holiday comes a DNA test from her younger sister that confirms her secret suspicions: she’s adopted. Having the truth out in the open leaves her feeling unmoored in ways she didn’t anticipate.

With so much of her life in upheaval, Veronica is looking for an escape. Inspired by her best friend, she plans to go to Europe to see four of the places listed on her DNA ancestry report. She treks to County Mayo in Ireland; the Dordogne region of France; the countryside of Lombardy in Italy, and Copenhagen, Denmark. She hopes to learn about where her family lived while also making connections for her rapidly expanding business, but she finds that each stop brings her visions of her ancestors that raise more questions than they answer. And among those pressing questions is how charming Irish castle keeper Niall Callahan will fit into her visions for the future.

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Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Liberty Scarf by Aimie K. Runyan, J’nell Ciesielski, and Rachel McMillan, which is out November 19th 2024.

As an ambitious scarf maker, Iris Braxton spends her days surrounded by color and luxury not often seen during the dark days of war that promised to be over by Christmas. That promise has come and gone for three years with still no end in sight and her days continue in a monotony of rations and threads while she spins a dream of becoming Liberty’s first female pattern designer. She hasn’t the time or interest in rakish soldiers, but the temporarily-on-leave Captain Conrad Jones is persistent–and before long his charm wins her over. But war is cruel and all too soon Conrad leaves once more for the Front, but not before vowing to meet again in Strasbourg, France, the most magical of Christmas cities. Iris begins stitching small messages into each of the scarves she makes in hopes that one will find a way into Conrad’s hands to let him know she’s thinking of him. And when she receives word that he’s wounded in Strasbourg, she rushes to his side. Along the way, she passes a woman wearing one of her scarves . . .

Geneviève Tremblay, a French-Canadian immigrant, is a telephone operator living in Lewiston, Maine. Her beau is a member of a prominent family who has helped to Americanize her in a community often unfriendly to Canadians. As part of this effort, she enlists in the US Army Signal Corps to serve as a bi-lingual operator. Along the way, she meets a French officer who makes her question whether losing her identity is too heavy a price for acceptance.

The Clara Janssens, a Flemish Nurse, and Roman Allaire, an Alsatian violinist, are chosen to play for an orchestra providing morale on the front lines. This is a world they’ve never known, far beyond their routine provincial and countryside lives–and the expectations in those towns. Their love of music creates a spark between them, but the destruction of battle and the fulfillment of a promise threaten their romance. Still, the appearance of a kind stranger and the unexpected gift of a treasured scarf bind them long beyond their stolen moments and offer them a future beyond what they could have even hoped.

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About Mademoiselle Eiffel: Claire Eiffel’s story of love, devotion, and the frantic pursuit to preserve her family’s legacy is not only an inspired reflection of real personages and historical events, but a hymn to the iconic tower that dominates the City of Lights.

Claire Eiffel is a remarkable woman who was largely lost to history. I suspect that most people who ascend the Eiffel Tower and see the wax figurines of the famous architect Gustave Eiffel and the American innovator Thomas Edison, they dismiss the blonde woman in the background as Eiffel’s kindly daughter who was there to serve coffee and biscuits and to ensure the men’s comfort was seen to when they discussed more weighty topics.

In truth, from the age of fourteen, Claire was charged with raising her four younger siblings and running the household owing to the early death of her mother. Aside from these expected duties, Claire was her father’s assistant and confidante in business as well as the domestic sphere. There is an abundance of correspondence between Claire and her aunt and grandparents during her first trip to Porto, Portugal where she went with her father to oversee the final days of the building of the Maria Pia bridge that express her worries for her younger siblings and provide a window into her personality, but in other key periods, like the months surrounding the building and opening of the Eiffel Tower, no such records exist.

The reason is simple: Claire was usually with her father and the other members of her family during that essential, and likely frantically busy, period of her life, so no correspondence was necessary… or indeed the family decided for reasons unknown not to preserve it. So that left me with the daunting task of recreating her life from what we knew of her father’s whereabouts and the struggles he was facing in the media and with the Parisian bureaucracy that was feverishly trying to protect themselves from any financial fallout if the tower project were to fail.

I was confident in one decision: whatever troubles Gustave Eiffel was facing, Claire was weathering them at his side. His struggles were hers, and she would have been strategizing how best to spin these various obstacles to the benefit of her father, the family, and the Compagnie Eiffel. She was deeply devoted to her father, this much is certain. She lived with him for the rest of his life even after she was married, she and her husband preferring to rent rooms from her father rather than set up a household of their own. I was very comfortable assuming that Claire was at her father’s side, and there is photographic evidence to corroborate this assertion, but to craft Claire’s story required extracting it from the shadow of her father’s.

My job was to extrapolate from what I did know about her and her father to be able to interpret her motivations and recreate the contents of her heart and mind in order to mold a believable and sympathetic character. I have no evidence, for example, that Claire was an artist, but it provided me with a way to give Claire both a link to her father’s world of design as well as ambitions and dreams of her own. It’s possible that a woman in Claire’s time might have been content to run a home and manage her father’s affairs, but I don’t think Claire would have been satisfied with such a workaday existence, nor would the modern reader be able to connect with a woman of such small vision for her life.

Constructing Claire’s story required a good deal of digging in the details of the lives of others to create a complete image because, like so many women in the past, their roles were seen as secondary or lesser than the men they supported. But I am fully convinced that without his daughter’s love and support, Gustave would have struggled to reach the heights, figurative and literal, he scaled to in his lifetime. It was a distinct honor to pull Claire’s story from the shadows and give her a much-deserved moment in the sun.

The post A Woman In Shadows appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Hi, Aimie! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?

Hi! In addition to being an author of historical (and soon contemporary!) women’s fiction, I am a wife, mother of two, and devoted staff to two cats and a dragon. I live in Estes Park, Colorado, which is pretty dang amazing, and therefore spend a lot of time hiking. And even before A Bakery in Paris, I was a keen amateur baker with some mean cheesecake skills.

When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?

If I had to pin it dowm, it would be third grade. We had the chance to write stories in our own blank books and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Mine was leopard print…so, extra cool. I was also cast as Scribbler Mouse in the school play and discovered one of my all-time favorite Middle Grade reads that year: A Royal Pain by Ellen Conford. So basically 1987 was a banner year.

Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!

See above, A Royal Pain for the first time I ever felt really really immersed in a book. First book I remember reading was probably the great classic The Monster at the End of This Book, which I contend is a treasure of American Literature. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett made me fall in love with Historical Fiction, and changed the focus of my reading and my writing.

Your latest novel, A Bakery in Paris, is out August 1^st! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

Les Misérables meets Chocolat. Do I get a bonus point for doing it in four?

What can readers expect?

Love stories, heartache, redemption, rebuilding, class struggles, hope, and great food.

Where did the inspiration for A Bakery in Paris come from?

In 2020, I was hunting for an idea and my then-boyfriend, a historian, said I should consider the Paris Commune as a setting for a book. I refreshed my memory on the period and knew he was right. Reader? I married him.

Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?

I love both Micheline and Lisette. I loved exploring Micheline’s struggle to gain some agency in a terrible situation, and I loved Lisette making some tough sacrifices for her beliefs. Many of the cooking scenes were pure bliss and I have an incredible soft spot for Sébas and Laurent.

What do you love most about writing historical fiction?

The excuse to get lost in the 900 section of the library for hours on end and to get paid for it? I mean, that’s pretty darn cool. I love crafting characters and making worlds come to life for readers, I can think of little that could make me happier.

What’s next for you?

On Febraury 13, 2024, I have my first contemporary The Memory of Lavender and Sage coming out, which is super exciting. If A Bakery in Paris is my love letter to Paris, Lavender and Sage is my love letter to Provence. Also in 2024, my next historical Mademoiselle Eiffel is slated to come out. It’s the story of Claire Eiffel, the daughter of the famous architect Gustave Eiffel, who was basically his assistant and right hand woman from the time she was fourteen until he died. Such a fascinating life she had!

Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?

OH MY GOSH, that question is so mean. I am loving Hotel of Secrets by Diana Biller and Summer of Songbirds by Kristy Woodson Harvey. Next up on my TBR is The Secret Life of Flora Lee by Patti Callahan Henry and To Free the Stars  by J’nell Ciesielski.

Will you be picking up A Bakery In Paris? Tell us in the comments below!

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