On Tuesday 10th December 2013 The Housemaid's Daughter will be published in the United States! I am tremendously excited about this, as is my publisher, St Martin's Press, part of Macmillan Publishers. Fifty thousand beautiful hardcovers will be hitting the shelves, and the publicity has already started. Here is the route to my publisher's page about the book.
www.us.macmillan.com/thehousemaidsdaughter/BarbaraMutch
You will see that the US cover has a new and fresh design, but one which still anchors the story in Africa. It features a young woman walking through a savannah landscape, towards an iconic flat-topped acacia tree. Once again the colours are reminiscent of the heat and dust of the continent, and hint at the stark challenge facing our heroine Ada, and her Irish employer, Cathleen.
US readers with e-devices like Kindle or iPad, will already have had the chance to read the novel by downloading it or listening to the audiobook version. But it's only when the physical book hits the shops that it will become visible to the widest possible audience.
And what an audience: 313 million people!
So... by my calculation... if only 0.1% of the population choose to buy it, that will mean about 300 thousand books will skip off the shelves! Now that would be worth celebrating! And it would catapult the tiny town of Cradock, where The Housemaid's Daughter is set, firmly onto the international tourist map, along with the dramatic Karoo landscape against which the action in the book plays out.
But, to come down from my castle in the air for a moment... if you have friends in the US who love to read then please let them know what's heading their way.
Your word-of-mouth is still, after all, the ultimate recommendation.
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