World Prose

The year is 1950. A brutal racist attack drives Alfie Bagliato's family from their small town to New York City, where, at sixteen, Alfie dreams of escaping his Italian American enclave through a career in music and a romance with his distant cousin, Adeline. Soon enough, disappointment and frustration lead Alfie to join the military, to follow Adeline to San Francisco, and then to become a New York City cop, whose clash with protestors during the 1968 Columbia University student uprising nearly kills him, forcing him to confront his inherited bigotry and fear, as he wrestles with his lingering love for Adeline and need to find a new life.

Blow Up the Ashes, Vol 2 of American Mayhem, reveals the story of Pierre Doucet, a gambler and then a killer for the New Orleans mob during World War 2 who at one time admires from afar a yellow-haired girl. When decades later he travels to New York, he meets KJ again. They discover she was his "yellow-haired girl. " KJ learns Pierre is a killer, but instead of drawing back in horror joins him. KJ and Buckles come together at the novels' end when Buckles wreaks revenge on Big Bill.

In 1967, the Summer of Love, 17-year old 'Buckles' Sinclair runs from her privileged home in Scarsdale to hitchhike to San Francisco, but instead of Flower Power, Peace, and Love she finds herself plunged into the darkest heart of the American nightmare. Her abandoned mother, KJ, rebuilds her identity and life in the company of a "family" of homosexual men-she is Wendy to The Lost Boys of Manhattan.

As a tsunami in South-East Asia kills three hundred thousand and Pope John Paul II lies dying, the lives of eight people in Rome are transformed by a Croatian housekeeper named Dubravka, who was betrayed in love and later witness to a miracle at the site of apparitions of the Virgin Mary. The stories of the North Americans and Italians she encounters interconnect and alternate with key episodes from Dubravka's life, as she struggles to resolve her personal concerns as well as the contradictions in her Catholic faith while working at a pensione in Rome's Campo de' Fiori, in the shadow of the statue of the martyred visionary Giordano Bruno.

In 2005, after four months in hospitals, Dick Rayburn returns home with a limp, a disfigured face, and pain. Around tense conversations between him and his wife, Valerie, concerning their absent son, Jamie, the narrative weaves memories triggered by objects in the house. An old self-portrait draws him back to his childhood and the studio of his father, who trained Dick to be an artist, while an article critical of the Iraq War, by the journalist to whom he was engaged when they were graduate students, resurrects the person he was and the woman he loved. Dick relives his evolution from a young artist and left-wing university student to the war profiteer Valerie blames for Jamie being in Iraq, and cannot stop reliving the horror that he witnessed the day he flew into Fallujah and was shot down as his helicopter left the city. To cope with the memories that haunt him, Dick returns to his passion for painting. He paints what he saw in Fallujah, the person he feels he has become, and the loved ones he has lost. The images emerge from a deep, dark background, the principal ingredient of which is ivory black.

Lake City has a lot of heavy weather, and it's not just in the air. Eduardo "Vince" Negron has a regular table at a bar-restaurant in Pigsville called El Perro Negro, from where he runs El Manojo, a motley assortment of hoodlums. Negron is minor league, but across town former gangster gone legit Lloyd Frend is thinking big: perhaps he will run for office one day; he will certainly make a heap more dough. Men will be caught in the crossfire between Negron and Frend as they battle for territory, not least Walt Hargrove, an appliance store salesman drawn to El Manojo by curiosity and the desire to make an extra buck or two. Told with a tongue in various cheeks, Pigsville is a gripping tale full of sex, drugs, and violence and not a little black humour.

A widower meets a man who can change the weather. A middle-aged woman attempts to freeze to death; A young man attempts to starve to death. A young woman navigates in a foreign city, constructing a new identity. A dancer is forced to accept a ride home from a bar comedian. A divorcee meets an elderly Japanese woman… From the sombre offices of Tokyo to the ESL classrooms of Toronto, see how they find their own therapeutic ways to reconcile with their loss, agony, and despair.

Celebrating life in America's fiftieth State A father in Hawaii takes his troubled son fishing, unable to tell him the sad news he must share. A woman is lost at sea during a reef walk and sends her family into turmoil. An unlikely relationship develops between a Realtor and an Ultimate Fighting Champion. These are just some of the sad, funny and memorable characters found in the Made in Hawaii short story collection.

The Starlight Hotel-Casino is the story of a troubled family business doomed to fail and the stressful dynamics among its members and key employees during the collapse. It describes the inner workings of the casino business and the demise of Reno as a major player in the industry; unable, as it was, to meet the triple threat of Las Vegas, Indian gaming, and the legalization of gambling throughout the United States and abroad. The novel is both a roman à clef and bildungsroman.

On civil rights and America's 1960s New Left movement. Set during America's 1960s New Left movement, The Opposition tells the story of twenty-something young men and women linked by a fierce desire to change the world who become involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements, when under the pressure of Vietnam, and America, unraveling, their web of passion and pain reaches a breaking point. Four women and four men meet in a Midwestern college town in 1963. As racist violence surges in the Deep South, they are seized by the civil rights movement. They all take part in demonstrations; Melissa, who is black, leaves to help voter registration in Mississippi, and several decide to organize in a poor white community in Cleveland. One of the women, Sally, has an illegal abortion. As the Vietnam war accelerates and things go awry with community organizing, some of the group get involved in antiwar projects, and another of the women, Valerie, goes to Mexico to study art. Matt, the son of a pro-war minister, is summoned by his draft board, and has a powerful drug experience on his way into draft resistance. The group rendezvous in Chicago during the Democratic Convention of August 1968 and the police do not take kindly to them. Passions flair and arguments erupt amid street fights. One of the activists, Kurt, reconsiders confrontations and decides to work with a liberal Congressman to lobby for legislation to end the war. Ronnie, a radical filmmaker, and his lover, Marcia, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, get close to the just-founded Weathermen. The novel moves through these eight lives to a tragic conclusion.

Eilidh, bright, headstrong and feisty, gets sparkling exam results that confirm her university place. Her boyfriend reveals he has deceived her. In the ensuing argument she is knocked unconscious. She arrives in 1984, in an Ethiopian refugee camp, where she nurses a dying child, then a wounded aid worker before wakening back home in present-day Scotland. Three days later, at an isolated beauty spot trying to come to terms with her ex boyfriend's betrayal and her experience in Ethiopia, she encounters Walter, who is in the early stages of dementia. He is there because of a tattoo on his wrist that simply states the date and location of the beauty spot. Eilidh recognises Walter's symptoms, takes him home and contacts his niece to come and collect him. Over the following 48-hour period Eilidh finds herself transported to various locations in Europe and North America, and time periods from the previous fifty years. Each episode draws her further into an unexpected and unconventional romance. Eventually she travels to WW2 blitzed Liverpool and meets a fellow time traveller who explains that Eilidh faces a decision with life and death consequences.

Diagnosed with Tourette's syndrome as a teenager, Adam, now a 26-year-old freelance designer, attends his first meeting at a social support group. Here he meets Anna, a charity worker with a face hemangioma, Marta a TV anchor with alopecia, and Eva a make up artist with vitiligo. The following week he moves in with them. Shaped after the writer's own experience of living with Tourette's syndrome, Adam tries to move from self-inflicted invisibility to being visible-in his family, career, and personal life. Invisible is a book about what it means to be different. A book that encourages acceptance and tolerance. A book about fear and escape, about the necessity of being loved and accepted. It's about the permanent struggle with your complexes and attempts to start loving yourself. It's about hard stories. But also about big hearts.

Samson Johnson has spent a life in politics. A self professed politics 'bicycle seat' finds himself run down and out of faith around 2014. Despite having worked many positions in numerous campaigns, for a litany of different causes all over the political spectrum, he is jaded, pained and full of doubt. In an effort to bring himself down from the non-stop, jet set campaigning lifestyle, Samson takes a quiet data entry job for a think tank in Washington DC, in an effort to reclaim stability in his life. Within weeks however, Samson's attempt at finding serenity is shattered with reports of another mass shooting. Samson finds himself possessed to address gun violence and begins a one man campaign to end it forever. From Militia men in Oklahoma, to a Pride Center in Vermont, from shareholders in California, to reservation workers in South Dakota – Samson Johnson's 'Believe America' movement traverses all over America to reach its people. Yet as the movement builds in popularity so does Samson's reflection on his policy. Across his journey, he is given the creeping realization that his policy may be woefully misguided and in fact, stand to do more harm than good.

Matisse: The Only Blue interweaves scenes from the second half of artist Henri Matisse's life in the south of France (1907-1954), with reflections on his artwork. The work explores: artistic creation and community, love and betrayal, landscape, home and exile, family, and war. It portrays an eclectic mix of artists, dancers, models, gallery owners, art patrons, friends and family members, struggling through the upheavals of the first half of Twentieth Century, culminating in the devastating realities of two world wars and the economic collapse wedged in between.

A story of three loves and a journey of self-discovery. After years spent living in the Middle East, Sofia, an Italian freelance journalist, moves back to England, determined to leave her past behind and build a new life for herself and her daughter in Leeds. On a night out on the town, she meets an enigmatic Iranian man whom she is immediately drawn to, as he reminds her of her Omani ex-husband At first, she seems to have many things in common with him: from a difficult childhood and a rebellious personality, to a disdain for social norms and a nostalgic love for the Middle East. The two enjoy a whirlwind romance which will make her question herself and her certainties. As she relates her story to him, she will be forced to face her painful past, and make sense of it to discover a new sense of self that will change her outlook on life forever.

A highly readable, intimate story about loss, aging, female friendship, family, and renewal…told with grit and humor. Lexi is a sixty-year-old widow whose solitary life is thrown into turmoil when a desperate young woman moves in with her, soon followed by the unexpected arrival of her best friend, who has separated from her husband of forty years. The mix of these three very different personalities – a powerful omnivore seeking to live life to the fullest; a sweet, self-denying vegan; and Lexi, a thoughtful, still grieving widow – leads to some surprising (sometimes humorous) situations that force Lexi to re-examine her life. In the physics of relationships, Lexi observes that nature abhors a vacuum. She begins to wonder if she herself has somehow manipulated her circumstances to fill that vacuum…simply to imitate the life she had before the death of her husband. "[The Physics of Relationships] was a joy to read. I loved the flow of the writing, the profundity of the observations, and the humor. You have truly sketched a very accurate, forgiving, and endearing picture of a woman at this stage of life. Thank you for writing this book." -Kaiya Cade Smith Blackburn "You did an amazing job writing so truly in the voice of an older woman…. I found Lexi's character appealing from the first page, and her consistent voice made her a very sympathetic, fully realized character. I particularly enjoyed her reflections on all she observed about human nature and the realities and absurdities of aging. She is kind, funny, curious, thoughtful, eager to puzzle out relationships. …. I enjoyed the twists and turns and tensions of the plot, three women living together, and the extra complication of Tasha [her daughter], and romantic partners, and the suspense of whether a myriad of small/large issues will get resolved." - Rosalyn Art

Al is in his early sixties, retired from business, happily married. He meets a much younger woman, Courtney, whom he befriends. His immediate difficulty is to define the friendship: His wife, Kimberly, regards the friendship with Courtney as inimical to their marriage. Kimberly insists that Al chooses between her and Courtney. He must confront the issue of what constitutes love; and whether and how much he loves the two women, and in what different ways. Al ends his friendship with Courtney but feels badly about it – he thinks that he has behaved poorly, and that he has let her down. Kimberly is deeply angry, but he slowly recovers her trust, and they resume their erstwhile happy marriage.