Books Spark Joy with Lily Malone

It's been a while since the last Books Spark Joy post but this week I'm so happy to welcome Lily Malone to the blog. Lily is the author of six full length rural romance stories and a novella all published by Harlequin Escape. Her debut trade paperback, The Vineyard In The Hills, was published by Harlequin MIRA in September 2016. Last Bridge Before Home, her most recent release, is the third of three books set in the fictional Western Australian town of Chalk Hill.When she isn't writing, Lily likes gardening, walking, wine, and walking in gardens (sometimes with wine). She also doesn't mind the odd game of cards and loves her regular Thursday Night hand with the Card Girls. She lives in the Margaret River region of Western Australia with her husband, and two handsome sons who take after their father. Lily is a member of Australian Rural Fiction and Australian Fiction Authors.  

Over to Lily ...

It seemed crazy to me that I when I sat down to write my contribution to Pamela Cook’s lovely Books Spark Joy series… my mind was blank. I had no idea what I’d say.Which of my books sparked joy?I don’t have a lot of books, not really. We don’t buy many new books in my house because these days I tend to use my Kindle. We have authors we return to again and again, like John Sandford and Michael Robotham and we do tend to buy these or borrow from the library in print as my hubby likes reading them too.But a Robotham and Sandford book or our many Stephen King stories, they aren’t really the type to strike joy. They’re way too dark for that. The Conan series you’ll see on our shelf do make me smile…And then I saw The Silver Brumby series by Elyne Mitchell, on a middle shelf.   Boy did these spark joy!Silver Brumbies Of The South was a hard back book in my nanna’s bookshelf which I discovered when I was a horse-mad girl of probably 8 or 9. It was the first series of books I remember reading and for years and years I could lose myself in tales of Thowra and Baringa and Lightning and Golden. It’s quite possible those books sparked my love of the Australian bush: its birds, flowers, orchids - something I still enjoy to this day.A few years ago for either Christmas or my birthday, my husband bought me the new reprints of the Silver Brumby Series and I read them again.When I look hard at my bookshelf, I see so many old favourites. I must have read Jean M Auel’s Earth Children Series twenty or thirty times; and all the fantasy Raymond E Feist and Janny Wurts stories, Magician, Silverthorn etc, and Daughter Of The Empire. My copy of The Servant Of The Empire has to be held together with a rubber band!More recently it was the Twilight Series that wormed its way onto the shelf. (My husband is very protective of what he calls ‘his’ bookshelf and my books struggle to find a space - hence the very chaotic thrown-together feel of the shelf).  Just lately, we’re discovering that the sun is doing a fair bit of damage to our books when it comes in and strikes the covers through the window. Hubby wants to get curtains or blinds but I do love seeing the outdoors unfiltered, so it will be interesting to see which of us gets his or her way. And really, I don’t worry about covers so much. It’s what’s inside a book that sparks joy for me. 

Connect with Lily:

On Facebook, and on Twitter: @lily_lilymalone.To contact Lily, email lilymalone@mail.com or visit www.lilymalone.blog