Kirjahaku

Where I Fall, Where She Rises is a novel that follows two women on opposite ends of a terrorist kidnapping. While one woman suffers and falls at the hands of her captors, the other exploits the fame of such a publicized event to secure a future for her unborn child. Lea Ironstone is a Canadian freelance journalist who recalls her time spent in the very dangerous red zone of Baghdad, after the 2003 U.S. invasion. A self-destructive addict, she refuses to relegate herself to the safer green zone, where most mainstream news journalists like Paul Shell are protected. Desperately seeking a more controversial story to re-establish his fame as a television journalist for GNN, Paul Shell contacts Lea and agrees to meet her in the red zone for a recent finding. They are kidnapped by an insurgent terrorist sect and tortured repeatedly. Carol Shell, Paul Shell's wife lives in New York. Eight months pregnant, Carol is approached by Timothy Abel, her husband's agent. Timothy wishes to represent her "victimhood," which he sees as a very marketable and exploitable asset. Her appetite for fame and celebrity eclipses her familial priorities and she is coerced into a lifestyle that hinges on personal promotion. Lea and Paul find themselves incarcerated in a basement dungeon expecting their next "artistic" torture, while Carol makes her next public appearance to further her star. Lea and Paul's relationship evolves into a mutual understanding of their united fate, while Carol, on the other side of the world, rises in public stature. The novel evolves into an emotional satire, which depicts two strong women who attack the consequences of war on two different fronts.

"Lock 7" is the highest and last lift up the historic Welland canal. In this literary novel, it is also the dominant metaphor for Leo's final life epiphany. The one that always seems to come too late... Leo Meurso, a trained mercenary and assassin gone AWOL, has crossed some bad people and is now his employer's next hit. With a death sentence hanging over him, Leo decides to return home after twenty years of absence. His plan is to attend his best friend's wake and crash his high school sweetheart's wedding, both scheduled on the same day. Wedged between, then pressed through such polarizing events, and motivated by the reality that at any juncture of the day he will soon be killed, Leo revisits family, the girl next door, the town fool still pining for his friendship and a host of others in a small canal town bursting with revelations of past secrets, sexual deviances, nostalgic memories, and the protagonist's ultimate goal. Lock 7 is an edgy, poetic, modern day literary parable about a man's confrontation with death on the eve of his life's ironic resurrection. Will Leo accept the just consequences of past actions, or will his epiphany release him from judgment?

What happens when the narrator is removed from a story? When the author's real life is fictionalized instead, so that creator and creation relate on the same existential ground with no middleman? Chameleon (Days) is such an experiment in storytelling, a literary novel that explores an author's psychotic break as he prepares to write an idea he has apparently stolen, one prompted by the discovery of a secondary character in his walk-in closet. A fictional day-to-day narrative structured around the search for Kashif, a feared and hunted terrorist labeled the Chameleon for the many facial surgeries he has incurred to disguise his identity, Chameleon (Days) bridges its author's life to the evolution of Kashif's story creating a fiction "while life happens," which often manifests itself in interference, inspiration, and the perils of letting your character know who his creator is.