At long last, the first two preview copies of my new book, Je t'aime à La Folie, have arrived here at La Folie, with official publication due on the 22nd July.
I feel excited to see them; to see so much hard labour finally converted into a solid object - bits into atoms - which feels satisfyingly weighty in the hand. I have them here on the table next to my desk, and quietly stroke them from time to time; when nobody is watching, obviously. I do pity the authors of the future, whose books will only be read in digital formats, as patterns of light and darkness on a glimmering screen.
Fittingly for a book that took so long to write, the cover went through many incarnations, too. Some of these incorporated a picnicking pair of love-birds of such vivid hideousness that I thought bookshops might refuse to stock the thing, for fear of scaring the horses, or else being prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. Other covers depicted the crumbling façade of La Folie as a 1950s' Barratt Home, which wasn't quite right, either. I hope that the cover finally chosen reflects something of the book's jauntiness, and evokes the cover of Book 1 without being mistaken for it.
Above all, I hope that anyone who reads the book will enjoy it. As with C'est La Folie, I have put a great deal of myself, and all my energies, into writing and rewriting it, nurturing its progress like a troublesome child. Now it is time to send it out into the world, and for Je t'aime à La Folie to fend for itself...
