Blog Tour Author Post: Karen Swan

Today is my stop on Karen Swan's blog tour for her new book Summer at Tiffany's, and Karen has been kind enough to write me a post to feature today! I have also been able to review the book itself, and it certainly is a brilliant summer read that I can recommend.

Please enjoy Karen's article below! You can buy Summer at Tiffany's as a paperback or an eBook now.

Why a happy ending and Happy Ever After aren’t necessarily one and the same.

If I had a penny for every time I’d been asked to write a sequel to Christmas at Tiffanys, well…I probably wouldn’t have had to write the sequel! It’s fair to say those characters really struck a chord, not just in the UK but internationally as well, with readers from Italy and Canada and Germany making regular contact to ask for more about Cassie and Henry, Suzy and Arch, Kelly and Anouk. And I’ll be honest, I was reticent to even think about it for a long time. As far as I was concerned, I had squared the circle, rounding off their mutual adventures with a highly satisfactory, happy ending.

Only… it wasn’t an ending, not in the real life sense. Though it was the end of that book, it wasn’t the end of their story, it was really just the end of their beginning (are you still with me?) I began to get the feeling that even though I had closed the cover on a perfect moment in time where everything had converged to a singular point of happiness, embodied in the engagement ring - it was still only a moment in time. Several years on, where would they all be now? After all, no-one moves on after a decade of marriage and the most terrible betrayal that Cassie suffered, without a backwards glance, even if they do have someone like Henry helping them through it. The heart is a complicated thing – it doesn’t necessarily love in chronological order, sometimes there is overlap; people feel vulnerable or confused, the timing might be off. So I began to wonder, the ‘what ifs’ started up in my mind again: Cassie and Henry had found each other, she had found herself, they were perfectly in synch with one another. But what if in the passing of time they found they wanted different things? Or the same thing but at different times? There’s no doubt their love is true but can they make it endure? It was only when I understood this difference between a happy ending and Happy Ever After that I knew I’d found my sequel.