Books by Larry Farmer

It was a new age, one called the Age of Aquarius, with a restless, ideological generation full of a reverence for new worlds opening up to new ideas. When the Beatles introduced the mystique of India to pop culture, the Hippie Trail was established as hip adventurers traveled overland from Europe to Kathmandu and India. Hunter was not among these hipsters. Still bitter over the way he was treated as a Marine combat veteran home from the Vietnam War, he felt the allure of the open road in America and in Europe. While getting visas in Vienna, he came across a Polish girl, Ewa, whose Politburo father got her unequal privileges she gladly abused to join Hunter on the trek to India to check out the new-age ashrams. Shared experiences and hardships bonded them, but Cold War politics made falling in love the worst hardship of all.

The Kerr Construction Company Dalhart McIlhenny wants something different in his life. Something others of his generation wouldn't understand. His search takes him to the Indian Capital of America, to a minimum wage job as a construction laborer with the Navajo and illegal aliens. Something so far away from the fast life and consumerism of Houston. Then he meets Carmen. Rendezvous with Fay. Fay makes everything seem easy. Life, living together, happiness. And love. Dutch knows he loves her as she does him. Texas seems far away now. Home is with Fay in San Diego. This is where he wants to stay. Can a free spirit and a former Marine find a future together?

Following his stint as a Marine during the Vietnam war, James needs something beyond the mundane conformity of his life in Vicksburg, Mississippi. As he enters the Peace Corps, a political reformer named Benigno Aquino is gunned down in the turbulent Philippines, half a world away. James has no idea fate will interweave events for him to witness the overthrow of a dictatorship and the miracle of a bloodless revolution. Lois has joined the Peace Corps to explore the world outside her staid Ohio upbringing. As a teacher in a remote village she totes her own household water from a distant source, learns to accept locals wandering through her hut at all hours, and even becomes accustomed to gunfire in the jungle night. But when the visit of a suspected spy to her village threatens their lives, she and her friend James must make a decision of lasting import.

Jericho, just out of the Marines, returns to his roots in Texas only to face the anti-war movement that demonizes all Vietnam vets. He needs to sort through his life away from all that, and in his travels he stumbles upon a Shangri-La called the Lake District of England. There is peace and serenity around those lakes. And a girl-a beautiful, soulful girl he meets while working in the restaurant of a luxury hotel. Gail is deep and intellectual, a mother-earth type who gives him peace inside. But when the Yom Kippur War breaks out in Israel, he abruptly leaves her and goes to help the beleaguered Jewish state while seeking his Jewish identity. Yet neither Jericho nor Gail could ever forget the depth of their love... Will meeting again, years later, resolve the feelings that never left them?