I Will Leave You Never
Zoe’s most devout wish is to keep her family safe. Her greatest fear is that she cannot. When threats begin to surface on all sides—her husband, Jay, diagnosed with cancer; a serial arsonist setting fires during drought season near the Pacific Northwest woods where she and Jay live with their three children—it seems her fear is about to be realized.
In the middle of a perilous drought in the Northwest, an arsonist begins setting fires all around. It gives Zoe Penney nightmares about her home—seated right next to tinder-dry woods—rising up in explosions of fire, as well as haunting dreams of a little boy deep in the forest.
Winter brings the longed-for rains but also a cancer diagnosis for Zoe’s husband, Jay, which plunges the family into disbelief and fear. The children lean in close to their parents, can’t stop touching them. As Jay’s treatment begins, nature lets loose with strange and startling encounters, while a shadowy figure hovers about the corners of the house.
First, Zoe’s fear turns to anger: How can I love you if I am to lose you? How can I live in joy when the sky is falling? But she gradually learns that it’s possible to love anything, even terrible things—if you can love them for what they are teaching you.
Cuban Quartermoon
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Preface
Why did Laura (Annie Laurie) Gallagher lose both her parents the summer she turned twelve? Answers can’t be found by running away, but she’s doing just that. She’s been living a half-life for so long—the death of her mother, her baby girl, her marriage. Now she’s run off again—this time to Cuba. But Cuba seduces her, betrays her, takes her apart, and transforms her.
Her rite of passage begins with a violent illness and the appearance of a woman named Maria. It deepens in Old Havana, where a man slams her against a wall and whispers, “Mind your own business.” What business? Laura is so beguiled by Maria and the Cuba she embodies, she can’t help but be pulled into her dark-tangled drama.
Thus begins Laura’s journey across a ravishing and perilous terrain—both dreamscape and landscape—from tourist Havana with its mojitos and Havana Club, to an alley in Central Havana, with its mysterious Santeria drumbeat, and finally to the caves of Pinar del Rio, where she discovers her own family’s heart of darkness and the answers she seeks.
Short-listed for the May Sarton Prize for Historical Fiction
Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye
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Preface
This is the story of my mother and father and my dashing, bachelor uncle, my father’s identical twin, and how they lived together with their courage and their stumblings, as they made their way into old age and then into death. And it’s the story of the journey from one twin’s death to the other, of what happened along the way, of what it means to lose the other who is also oneself.
My story takes the reader through the journey of the end of life: selling the family home, re-location at a retirement community, doctor’s visits, ER visits, specialists, hospitalizations, ICU, nursing homes, Hospice. It takes the reader through the gauntlet of the health care system with all the attendant comedy and sorrows, joys and terrors of such things. Finally it asks: what consolation is there in growing old, in such loss? What abides beyond the telling of my own tale? Wisdom carried from the end of the journey to readers who are perhaps only beginning theirs. Still, what interest in reading of this inevitable journey taken by such ordinary people? Turned to the light just so, the beauty and laughter of the telling transcend the darkness of the tale.
During the final revisions of this book, my husband was dying of cancer, and he died before I could finish it. What I know so far is this: how pure love becomes when it is distilled through such suffering and loss–a blue flame that flickers and pulses in the deepest heart.
As I finish this book he is gone three months.