“Everyday eBook.” If there’s one novel in the world that should appear on a website with this name, it’s my debut, The Expats. Ridiculous claim? Bear me out:

It’s four years ago. My wife comes home one night and asks, “What would you think of living in Luxembourg?” Like you, I never, ever considered living there; I wasn’t entirely sure where — or what — Luxembourg was. But this was a good time for me, and for our family, to pick up and move. So we did.

And so there I was, no longer a book editor and a ghostwriter in New York City, but a stay-at-home dad in a tiny city in Western Europe, tending to our four-year-old twins, keeping house, trying to get by in French. Cooking and cleaning, shopping and driving, tidying and washing, every day.

Meanwhile, every day my wife went to an office early in the morning, and came home late, late at night. Basically all her colleagues worked on the West Coast, nine hours behind Central European Time. Which meant that her meetings and conference calls started in the evening, and often lasted past midnight. Other days, she was in England or Germany, France or Italy.

Sometimes, so was I. We traveled a lot, because that’s what you do if you’re an expat; that’s one of the reasons to be an expat. We were in Rome when Barack Obama was elected. We spent a Thanksgiving in Amsterdam. One Christmas driving through Bavaria, another skiing in the French Alps. Weekends in London and Paris. I’d sometimes go to Paris by myself – it was an easy two-hour train ride – to get a break from the everyday grind, to walk around a big city, ride a subway, feel the energy of a world capital.

Then we’d come home to little old Luxembourg, and return to our routines, which for me included writing. After school drop-off, I’d go to a café with my laptop, chronicling the everyday life I was living, and the people who surrounded me. Eventually, to make it more exciting, I added a spy (or two). Then a chunk of stolen money. And before long my novel had turned into a full-blown espionage thriller.

But when I was halfway through working on this manuscript, our expat adventure suddenly ended. My wife had come to Europe in the first place with a very specific mandate, a mission that was nearly accomplished. Her job would soon get progressively less interesting, would become more about maintaining relationships than making deals, more about follow-up than innovation. Her everyday life would get less engaging. So she took a new job in New York, at the same outfit she’d quit a year and a half earlier. And we moved home.

So: back to my claim at the top, about the perfect marriage of The Expats and Everyday eBook. Because the thing that my wife spent a year and a half doing abroad was: working for Amazon. And her job at Amazon was to launch the Kindle in Europe. Which is to say that every day, eBooks were her life; eBooks were the reason we lived in Luxembourg, the reason I wrote a novel set there. The Expats would not exist without eBooks.

This story was originally published here: http://bit.ly/Ax4joN