Interview session with Sylva Kanderal.

A lonely cowboy coming home – Yes, that could be a possible title of the book, too. “Lonely Cowboy Coming Home” is a song that appears in the book. It’s an old, romantic and melancholic song full of love, expectations and loneliness. “Dancing with a Cowboy” is Sylva Kanderal’s second major literary work. We invited her to this month’s author interview to talk about her new book and it’s main focus.

What inspired you to write this book? It is very different from your intergalactic story “Freya’s Image”.

You always find an inspiration. There are the everyday things, the ordinary events that we hardly recognize or we quickly forget, but they motivate and indicate the direction that a future novel could take. For this book they were the words of my friend. Shortly before I left Switzerland for the USA, she had told me that as a young woman, she had always wanted to dance with a cowboy. I had liked her dream very much, so I took up the subject and I wrote a novel about it.

But dancing with a cowboy is not the main focus of the novel. Why?

No, it’s not, you are right; but it’s the basis, the plot for what happens. The two protagonists are alone and lonely. They cover up the emptiness in life with a lot of work, which is crowned with success and also involves considerable danger; but work alone, however exciting and profitable, can rarely give a person what love brings, the warmth, the joy, the tenderness, the security, the possibility to lean on someone, to share and to give.

So, is it a romance novel?

Of course, love plays an important, almost central part in the book, but it’s not just about a love between a man and a woman. There are the positive influences of the loving background in the family, which gives, carries and supports everyone a lot. These are, for all of us, the beautiful sides of love, which we very often take automatically, without wondering whether it could be completely different. As an antipode to “normal” love, this book describes uncontrolled self-love, narcissism, which led to brutal violence and the destruction of a person.

One can look forward to the book. Thank you for the interview.


About the book

Title: “Dancing with a Cowboy”
Author: Sylva Kanderal
Plot: The day of her greatest professional triumph becomes the worst day for the young lawyer Veronique Morgan. She buries herself in her work, but it soon turns out that her work itself holds more dangers than Veronique ever thought it could …

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