Choc Lit’s Australian Star

We are extremely pleased to have the honour of announcing the winner of Choc Lit’s Search for an Australian Star.

Congratulations to Beverley Eikli, who won with The Reluctant Bride, a Regency romance. Lyn Vernham from Choc Lit said ‘We’re really excited to have Beverley on board and believe she’ll be a big asset to the team, and a great pioneer for Choc Lit in Australia.’

The Reluctant Bride

As Napoleon cuts a swathe across Europe, bereaved Englishwoman Emily Micklen must confront her allegiance to her traitorous half-French family to save the life of the honorable British soldier whose reluctantly accepted marriage offer saved her from destitution.

With Emily’s loyalty to England under scrutiny by the British Government, her bold gamble to foil an attempt on the life of her husband means estrangement from the father she reveres–and her own possible death.

Beverley Eikli wrote her first romance when she was seventeen. However, drowning the heroine on the last page (p550!) was, she discovered, not in the spirit of the genre so her romance-writing career ground to a halt and she became a journalist.

After throwing in her secure job on South Australia’s metropolitan daily The Advertiser to manage a luxury safari lodge in the Okavango Delta, in Botswana, Beverley discovered a new world of romance and adventure in a thatched cottage in the middle of a mopane forest with the handsome Norwegian bush pilot she met around a camp fire.

Eighteen years later, after exploring the world in the back of Cessna 404s and CASA 212s as an airborne geophysical survey operator during low-level sorties over the French Guyanese jungle and Greenland’s ice cap, Beverley is back in Australia living a more conventional life with her husband and two daughters in a pretty country town an hour north of Melbourne. She writes Regency Historical Intrigue as Beverley Eikli and erotic historicals as Beverley Oakley.

She writes traditional Regency Romance as Beverley Eikli and sensual historical romance as Beverley Oakley and has published six novels, with two more due out in January.

The Reluctant Bride will be published in early 2014. For more information, visit Choc Lit’s website.