Ashland

"Things have to be settled, or they never go away." Only weeks before she dies in March, 1984, Leo Nolan's mother shows her son a rose she says was just given to her by her brother, Jack, who disappeared 50 years earlier. After her death, letters from Jack begin to arrive at the family home. They are postmarked 1934. The final one is from Ashland, Kentucky. Leo heads to Ashland, to track down the source of the letters…. And to find out why they are arriving now, after 50 years. Time shifts. Time runs underground, then surfaces. It is 1934, and Leo experiences the Great Depression and the ghosts of the past as no one has in 50 years, in Ashland, where dreams die and are born again.

"Eternity is in the present. Eternity is in the palm of the hand." On a streetcar, on Christmas Day, 1950, clutching the chrome rail in front of him, Martin Radey looks at the woman seated beside him, a stranger, and utters his last words: "I can't breathe." Like millions, billions before him, it is his turn to die. But death is not what he expected. The journey has only begun. From 1880 to 1950, time happens to the world around him, not to memory, because memory, he discovers, is beyond time, traveling forward with him, shaping the earth, the sky, the heart.

"There's a line drawn across your life. You cross the line forever." When Leo Nolan's father dies in 1995, his stepson, Adam, now twenty-one, finally asks the question that he has never asked, the question he could never ask. He asks it simply. "Is my father alive?" ST. PATRICK'S BED, the sequel to the highly acclaimed, World Fantasy Award finalists SHADOW OF ASHLAND and A WITNESS TO LIFE, revisits Leo's family, eleven years after the momentous visit to Ashland, Kentucky. Thus begins this new odyssey to Dayton, Ohio, to the past, accompanied by family ghosts and the hard truths of the present. Leo's quest is both simple and complex: the need in the human heart for redemption, resolution and homecoming.

This family saga that travels through time-from modern Toronto to Depression-era Kentucky-and explores how the ghosts of the past shape our history. Every family has its stories: joys and losses, hopes and regrets. For the family that populates these three novels, the secrets forgotten with the passing of years become suddenly accessible, as journeys through time unite loved ones across the decades. Shadow of Ashland: Leo Nolan's mother shows him a rose just before she dies-and claims it was given to her by her brother, who disappeared fifty years earlier. Leo is sure it's the delirium talking, the rambling of a sick and elderly woman. But after her death, letters from the same long-lost brother begin to arrive at the family home, postmarked 1934-plunging Leo into a journey that will take him all the way from Canada to Ashland, Kentucky, where he will walk through a window that leads to another time and world. St. Patrick's Bed: In the final chapter to the Ashland Trilogy, a son of the next generation asks questions about his biological father and sets off along with Leo on a quest for his heritage and history. A highly acclaimed epic from "a special writer," The Ashland Trilogy blends the fantastical and the real in a tale that will resonate with anyone who has yearned to know more about the generations who came before.