A Light on the Veranda
by Ciji Ware

Ciji Ware's latest release from Random House/Ivy continues where her best selling MIDNIGHT ON JULIA STREET--set in steamy, elegant, decadent New Orleans--left off.

A LIGHT ON THE VERANDA takes place two years later in regal, antebellum Natchez, a town of twenty thousand souls perched high on a bluff overlooking the mighty Mississippi.

When classical harpist Daphne Duvallon left the Big Easy at the eleventh hour in the middle of her own wedding and ran away to New York, she vowed never to return to the land of her ancestors.

Now, weary from professional battles and personal despair, she has come back to the South, to Natchez, a city as mysterious and compelling as the ghostly voices that haunt her dreams. A hasty visit to play the harp at her half- brother King's wedding becomes an unexpected rendezvous with her future when she meets Simon Hopkins, a nationally- renown nature photographer from San Francisco with a dark secret of his own.

Despite her overbearing "magnolia mama" lurking three hours away down river in New Orleans, Daphne decides to spurn her successful classical music career in Manhattan to spend a year in Natchez exploring life as a jazz musician. Her first defiant act is to electrify her harp and co-found an all-woman band called the Aphrodite Jazz Ensemble.

For the first time in years, Daphne knows what she wants- until shadows from another life that cannot forget or forgive threaten to silence the music in her life and destroy her only real chance for happiness.

Other Books by Ciji Ware

Midnight On Julia Street

Ciji Ware's Bio

In addition to her career as a novelist, CIJI WARE broadcast daily in Los Angeles as a reporter and commentator on radio and television for more than twenty years. The author of six published books, her numerous awards include an Emmy and a Dupont for her television work, a Silver Gavel for magazine journalism, and "Best Fictionalized Biography" from Romantic Times magazine for her first novel, ISLAND OF THE SWANS. In 1993, she was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and in 2001 won a Dorothy Parker Award of Excellence in the coveted "Classics" category. Ware's most recent novel from Random House/Ivy is A LIGHT ON THE VERANDA. She has also published the non-fiction work, SHARING PARENTHOOD AFTER DIVORCE. Ciji Ware and her husband, Internet executive Tony Cook, live on Nob Hill in San Francisco, California in a Julia Morgan building designed by the architect of Hearst Castle. She is a graduate of Harvard University in history and served as the first woman graduate of the College to be President of the Harvard Alumni/ae Association. In 1995, her son Jamie also graduated from Harvard and currently works in the film industry as a cinematographer and editor. Ware's late father, Harlan Ware, wrote the radio classic "One Man's Family," and was also a novelist, publishing with Random House. Her late uncles Leon Ware and Darrell Ware wrote novels and screenplays. Her ancestor, William Ware, was the author of ZENOBIA, published in 1898. The research for Ware's novels that seamlessly interweave history and contemporary life have taken her to the Highlands of Scotland, Wales, England and Ireland; to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Natchez Mississippi, among many other destinations. Presently she is at work on a novel set closer to home in the tumultuous year following the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.