SummaryCiji 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.
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