I’m so happy! I can now share that I’ve accepted an offer from my usual publisher, Joffe Books, to publish my third multiverse romance in Summer 2024. Yay!
The offer didn’t come without a couple of conditions—mainly that I revise a couple of spots, add some context and clarifications, and most importantly, rewrite the ending to make it a little less… ethically ambiguous, let’s say. I’ve already redone the ending, and the rest I’ll do over the next few weeks and then get the final MS back to Kate, Joffe’s publishing director, who has been so helpful and thoughtful.
I won’t share the title yet (although Kate loves my suggested title and hopes to keep it), just in case there’s a consensus among the Joffe team that it should be changed later. But I can tell you a bit about the new story!
Book three tells the tale of Millie, a 30-year-old marketing manager who lives in Chicago. Millie has a great life with a promising career and a loving found family in her best friend Bonnie, and Bonnie’s kind older brother, Ben. But Millie’s love life? Not so great. Just like her flake of a mother, Millie always chooses the wrong men. Current case in point: her office crush, a married man who cares for Millie but will never leave his wife and kids. Working with him on a multiverse-themed campaign has led Millie to ponder if there’s another world where they met earlier and are a couple. Millie tells herself, “Somewhere, in another universe, we’re together.”
When Millie finds a door that, each time she walks through, thrusts her into alternate versions of her life, she’s perplexed and terrified—but she also thinks she might have found the solution to her heartbreak. If she hunts through the multiverse of her possible realities, maybe she’ll find that perfect life. But she’ll have to travel through many worlds to get there.
On her journey, our protagonist is forced to navigate wildly varied realities, facing extreme danger, desperate poverty, extraordinary riches, and miraculous joy. Not to mention, a string of seriously hot men (watch out for more spice in this one!). She also discovers that some things, and some people, are more important to her than she realized. Maybe Millie’s ideal life—and her perfect partner—aren’t what she thought at all.
So, that’s the premise of my new book—I hope it sounds intriguing! I’d describe it as my previous two books meets The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, with some vibes of the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once thrown in for good measure. A teeny smidge more multiversey/sci-fi/speculative than the first two novels, as this time we go through many universes, rather than a Sliding Doors-style two-universe switcheroo (which is what the first two books did). But this one is not too sci-fi for the traditional romance readers among you, as it still has world-realism and, of course, a focus on the romance and our protagonist’s emotional journey.
I’m incredibly excited about it, and I hope my lovely beta readers were right when several of them said it was my best book yet! Let’s hope the wider readership will agree. Now, I just have my minor revisions to do while the teams at Joffe Books and my literary agency, Levine Greenberg Rostan in New York, negotiate terms of the contract—the first version of this we received this morning.
It’s happening! Eeek!
CJ Connolly 