Books published by Adelaide Books

THE HOLDOUT is a philosophical novel set in modern-day Mississippi treating religion, sexuality, academic life and academic freedom, sports and sports culture against the backdrop of the quotidian daily malaise (named 'torpor' in the work) afflicting all people. The story is told through the first person viewpoint of Rhett Lawson, an ex-NFL player finishing up graduate school. Rhett is a sincere Catholic although obsessed with women and sex and finds himself often trapped in "the torpor." His two main companions are his friends Brent (an atheist) and David (an Evangelical Protestant). The three have wide-ranging discussions on various topics throughout the narrative. Additionally, issues of race (Rhett is white, his aunt Shelby, a central figure to the story, is black), the nature of contemporary academia, and commentary on life in twenty-first century Mississippi (something largely unplumbed in comparison to the plethora of works that have tackled the Civil War South of the 1860s or the Civil Rights Era South of the 1960s) underpin the story.

Following WWII, Japan is broken and in ruins, the people are starving. Nobuko Ito, a Japanese-American trapped in Japan by the war, and temporarily denied the right to return to her home in California, decides to remain in Japan after learning both her parents have died. Meanwhile, back in America, Keiko Ugawa and her father return to Portland, Oregon, after their release from Camp Minidoka in Idaho, where they spent three years behind barbed-wire with nearly ten-thousand other Japanese-Americans. Back in Portland, they face suspicion and 'No Japs' signs. In Idaho, Virginia Franconi marries John Sato, and together, with Virginia's brother Marc, turn the old farm into one of the state's biggest and most prosperous. Back in Japan, Nobuko is saddened by her failure to become pregnant. Masato surprises her with tickets to America, where they are to witness the marriage of Nobuko's brother, Mako, to Keiko Ugawa, who had met at Camp Minidoka. LOTUS BLOSSOM UNFURLING fills in the years and unites the families from Morgan's two previous novels, ECHOES FROM A FALLING BRIDGE and HARVEST THE WIND.

Virginia Franconi left home at eighteen, like the hounds of hell were nipping at my heels. Now, in her mid-twenties, she returns to the family farm in Idaho. Her sour, belligerent father, once an iron-fisted ruler, is weak and frail, no longer a threat. Marc, Virginia's brother, runs the farm. Virginia is pregnant, a secret she doesn't initially share with Marc or her father. With most young men off fighting the war in Europe or the Pacific, Marc worries who will help grow the food demanded by a hungry nation. When President Roosevelt orders all people of Japanese descent removed from the West Coast, Keiko Ugawa and her family find themselves in a crowded, tar-papered barrack, surrounded by barbed-wire and guard towers, where temperatures reach 130F in summer and minus 30F in winter. Dust and wind are constants. Her mother dies and Keiko's anger at authorities intensifies. Marc's worries about who will help him are solved when the government allows internees from nearby Camp Minidoka to work on surrounding farms. A saddened and still angry Keiko comes to the Franconi farm, along with several young men. While Keiko works in the house with Virginia, now approaching her due date, the young men join Marc in the fields. Keiko helps deliver Virginia's baby. The two women gradually become friends.

The stories in Truth Hurts explore the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of human beings as they confront everyday situations-situations at times baffling, uncomfortable, and complex-but always honest, intense, and unpredictable. This collection, featuring fifteen raw and vivid narratives, will remind the reader that truth hurts-more than we realize.

In this collection of lovingly-crafted stories, I Heard a Fish Cry, Carolyn Light Bell portrays animals as witness, alter ego, adversary, and foil to illuminate human fallibility. These satirical, often playful, stories leave us questioning our own intelligence. Light Bell is far-reaching in her scope and is unafraid to take on the subtleties of class, animal rights, generational differences and sex. People in these stories advocate, fear, exploit, or defend a variety of creatures, including wolves, cats, dogs, birds, cougars, and bulls, dead or alive. Animals, in turn, reveal particular qualities in human behavior that leave us vulnerable. As the stories evolve, the reader discovers that within the heart and soul of every human being lies a deep, biological connection to all animals.

During the turbulent sixties, the call for Quebec independence created a political and social maelstrom in Canada. For nearly ten years, riots, bombings, labor strikes and violent street scenes-many even worse than what we're seeing today-were part of everyday life in Montreal, the epicenter of battle. PATRIMONY represents the essence of that still-smoldering conflict. Told from the viewpoints of two brothers and a sister, PATRIMONY is about what happens in a country when political ideology resorts to terrorism. It's about what happens in a family when one brother believes in responsible political action to achieve his goals, and the other brother, a time-bomb ticking toward an explosion, will do anything to get what he wants, including using his own sister for blackmail. From PATRIMONY'S opening chapter, a trip to North Carolina where brother and sister buy explosives from gunrunners, to a factory bombing and a symbolic attempt to blow up a bridge, the plot moves quickly. It weaves through cultural differences, family and political conflicts, and ends in an unprecedented political crisis-Quebec under martial law.

Before he died, Henri Morais thought changing his name to Henry Maris, doing good deeds and surrounding himself with the splendor of the mountains in northern Idaho was enough. He thought that his guilt over being part of the violence of the Quebec separatist movement would be buried with him. It wasn't. A woman who comes to the funeral, a stranger, turns out to be the loose thread that begins to unravel his hidden past. Ellen Maris, isn't sure whom she's most upset with: her daughter, for going to Montreal and digging up what had happened so many years before; her son, for encouraging his sister; or Henry, for dying and leaving her. In desperation, she starts a small baking business from her home, all the while brooding over what Marie might find out in Montreal. Montreal during the violence-prone sixties; a bomb thrown into a crowded café in Bahrain; two helicopters burned by eco-terrorists in Idaho. TWO-HEARTED CROSSING tells the story of a flawed family, struggling to move forward in their suddenly upside-down world. It also tells a story of resilience, of survival, of hope and of love.

"There was a sub that day in freshman Latin class at St. Aloysius High in suburban San Antonio, Texas, so all hell had broken loose. Spitballs were flying, there were arm wrestling matches on desks, a trash can basketball game had broken out in a corner. Desks were rearranged for impromptu conference groups. The sub was a painfully-thin, prematurely-balding man who lost control of the class immediately. His protruding Adam's Apple bobbed up and down spasmodically. The underarms of his starched white discount store dress shirt were soaked in perspiration, his shiny black polyester slacks were hiked up high over white sports socks and brown tasseled loafers. His name was Mr. Waldo, the name itself the inspiration for put-downs and derision. I felt sorry for Mr. Waldo. I pitied him. I identified with him. He was somebody who was never going to command respect or command an audience. He had a wife and young child, he had told us, and I felt sorry for them, too. You could only hope they would be blinded to what a dufus their husband and father was."

"Reading Living Among Strangers is like watching a series of Beckett plays recast in the percussive, irreverent voice of a writer who takes nothing for granted, who follows the possibilities inherent in language and in everyday human failings. Here are characters estranged from the world: unparented kids walking the train trestle, a widowed mother whose pack of daughters push her toward assisted living, an alcoholic trying to give up drink by questioning the very root of desire. It is in the characters' estrangement that the reader finds kinship. As with the manicured Floridian lawns of Bahia Vista Estates in the title story, in this collection, "[t]here are rumors, things under the surface, things man-made and not." Richard Schmitt is a writer who digs beneath the surface to yield up beauty in the coarse, wisdom in the baffled." Jessie van Eerden , the author of a novel Glorybound "Richard Schmitt is a storyteller. His stories seem not to start so much as startle, drawing us into a world that might feel familiar, but that we've never seen quite this way. Like one of his narrators, he knows to ignore the map, point his nose, and go. The magic is in his sentences, which at their best are sleek and strange and urgent, surprising and illuminating." Peter Turchi, the author of A Muse and A Maze Linked by fear and yearning, awash with spirituality and its opposites, Richard Schmitt's Living Among Strangers covers all: from children perplexed by the aims of classmates and adults, to adults perplexed by the world of living creatures. These are stories to be read and reread, with many epiphanies in between. George Singleton, The Half-Mammals of Dixie

"The spiritual part of my body had taken over the rest of my mortal self...My whole perception of life was totally changed. I felt detached from all material things and was thinking only of the long voyage ahead, a voyage from which no one has ever returned. Even my sleep had been disturbed by dreams of family members who had passed away. They were beckoning me to join them. The scene was like a huge jigsaw puzzle falling into place, it was the picture of my life on earth at its end." The writing style, the flow of the stories, introduction and development of the complex characters, intense and multilayered plots with exciting twists and turns, original setting of each of the stories - everything about this collection of short stories and essays is a compliment to a wordsmith's craft. (Stevan V. Nikolic, Editor, Adelaide Literary Magazine)

"It's rare to find a character like Luther van der Loon who makes such a rich and lasting impression-so vividly wounded, exuberant in characterization. Luther embodies the anxious, angst-ridden neurotic we are afraid we will become, or maybe who we aspire to be. In his grief over his mother's accidental choking vis-à-vis death, his obsession with what is the point of life is simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious. I could read this novel a hundred times and never tire of it." - Amy E. Wallen, Author of When We Were Ghouls: A Memoir of Ghost Stories"An original and very funny novel about a man's obsessive longing and guilt after his mother accidentally chokes on wonton soup. We follow the endearing protagonist through a period of morning, cleverly interwoven with musical theory and an attempt to sue the Chinese take-out restaurant, all brought to a hilarious finale with a last symposium on medieval music." - Sheila Kohler, Author of numerous award-winning novels

In 1939, Nobuko Ito, a young Japanese-American woman, travels from her home in California to Japan, where she is to learn the culture of her ancestors. Tensions grow between the two countries. Soon her country and the country she has grown to love are at war. The next four years are brutal, both for those who go to fight (Hirotaka Katsuragawa, a young art student, Masato Abi, the son of local merchants, Toshio Hara, a farmer turned soldier), and those who remain behind (Nobuko, Yoko Yoshida, who manages the local pottery factory while her husband is fighting the war, and the women and children of Nishimi). In 1997, these characters are in their twilight years. Nobuko is a widow. Yoko is reduced to dusting and serving tea in the factory she once ran. Toshio has gone mad. Hirotaka has become the sensei, honored teacher. While the pottery factory is the heart of the village, Hirotaka is its soul. When a murder is committed, the motive is found buried beneath the rubble of a bridge destroyed in New Guinea, fifty-five years earlier. The noise of its fall still echoes...

"How could she wash herself of the blood and the semen? How could she cleanse herself of the betrayal? Would the memories of being raped and sodomized ever leave her mind or would they always be entrapped in her subconscious to present themselves in nightmares? Yes, the physical pain would eventually go away, but the mental anguish would never disappear. She knew that for a fact, and she shuddered at what her life would now become. She knew she was to blame for what had happened because she had been so stupid-so, so stupid to allow herself to trust those who should be trustworthy but weren't. All her life she had trusted so readily, so easily, and consistently she had been hurt and disappointed. She thought that something must be wrong with her to never learn from the painful lessons that had steadily followed her from early childhood, but she was an optimist and her heart went out to others too easily. "

Lila has no memory of who she is or how she ended up walking the streets of Manhattan alone in July of 2232. She only knows she is being hunted by day and haunted through the night by dreams of a man she can't remember apart from when her subconscious self holds him at gunpoint. Still reeling from the death of his brother, Derek seeks justice. When he views footage incriminating Lila, the woman he's come to care for perhaps too greatly, Derek knows something is very wrong. Derek's sister Desi blames herself for Damian's death, unable to forget how unkind she was to him at their last meeting and how she never repaid him for taking care of her after the death of their parents. In her guilt, she turns to Ravenna, a trained assassin and Damian's fiancée, to ensure that Lila is brought to justice while Desi herself seeks comfort in her brothers' business partner Eddie. Derek vows to find Lila before the police-and Ravenna, who is resolute that murder should be punished.