Burning Embers Cover Reveal and Guest Post

Hello! Today, I wanted to share you the new cover for Burning Embers by Hannah Fielding, a book that I reviewed in 2013.

Here is the gorgeous new cover:

Isn't it pretty?

And here is a guest post from the author, Hannah Fielding:

Three reasons I wrote my novel, Burning Embers
With my novel Burning Embers, there was a sense that the book had to be written; that I had to sit down and put pen to paper to bring the book to life. Here are the three most compelling reasons that drove me to spend so many hours sitting in my garden and sitting in my writing room to create this romance novel.

The dream of writing
The rambling house I grew up in was built on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean. My bedroom was light and airy and its three windows commanded the most breathtaking views of the ever-changing sea – up to the harbour in the distance – with glowing sunsets and romantic moonlit nights over a scintillating ocean. These spectacular tableaux made my imagination run wild and I would dream of princes that flew in from faraway lands on their magic carpets, of princesses dressed in gowns made of sunrays and of moonbeams, and of dragons lurking in those vast blue depths, rising from the waves that crashed against the rocks underneath my windows. These and many more stories I used to relate to my half-Italian, half-French governess. And so was born the dream of becoming a writer, and it is a dream that has stayed with me ever since.

The setting
Burning Embers began not as a story, but as a vivid landscape in my mind. 
The seed of the ideas was sown many years ago when, as a schoolgirl, I studied the works of Leconte de Lisle, a French Romantic poet of the 19th century. His poems are wonderfully descriptive and vivid – about wild animals, magnificent dawns and sunsets, exotic settings and colourful vistas. (See http://www.hannahfielding.net/?cat=7 for some translations of Leconte de Lisle poems.)
Then later on, I went on holiday to Kenya with my parents and I met our family friend Mr Chiumbo Wangai, who often used to visit us. He was a great raconteur and told me extensively about his beautiful country, its tribes, its traditions and its customs. I was enthralled. What a beautiful, wild, colourful, passionate country in which to set a love story!

The story
The idea for Burning Embers came to me one night at my home in France. I couldn’t sleep, and I was sitting up in my bed gazing out at the Mediterranean, watching the silver full moon shimmering on the sea. Then an ocean liner, all lit up, glided past. It was such a romantic sight that I found myself wondering about the lives of the people on board that ship. Who were they? Where were they going? And into my head walked the heroine of Burning Embers, Coral, a beautiful, naïve young woman returning home to the land of her birth. I grabbed the notebook beside my bed and began to write, and the skeleton of the first chapter of the novel took place – Coral alone on the deck of a ship grieving for her father and a love that was destroyed, and an enigmatic man, the alluring Rafe, who offers her the classic comfort of strangers.