THE GIRL FROM THE RIVER
THE GIRL FROM THE RIVER
FIRST EDITIONS ON SALE
SECOND EDITION COMING IN 2023
About the book:
The line between fiction and reality is blurred in this tale of UCLA student Catherine Langley, who comes face to face with the character Angela Star from one of her mother’s well-revered novels. Catherine is a musician trying to finish college, meet someone she can feel passionate about, and help her father who is dealing with a mysterious, malaria-like ailment. Angela disappeared in a turbulent river in one of the novella stories but re-emerged for over one hundred years to touch people’s lives in surprising ways. As she finds herself in the real world, she begins to remember a life not told in the novella - a life with a lover and a son four hundred years before the fiction was even imagined.
The two women develop a fragile bond through their interactions with a family friend of the Langleys suffering from Alzheimers; Catherine’s flute instructor and her quantum physics teacher; Catherine’s mother, who must ultimately revise Angela’s story; a horse with a wound infected by an ancient sword; and a black, woodwind professor whose ancestry traces back to the last place Angela saw her son - Ciudad de Oro, a Spanish slave-trading post in 16th century Portuguese East Africa.
What seems impossible becomes a vibrant and heart-stopping reality against the backdrop of Southern California’s Santa Monica Mountains, the spring rush of the San Gabriel River and the rich Hadzabe tribal area along the Ruaha River in Tanzania. The dimensions of time flood and converge, leading everyone on Cat’s and Angela’s paths to a new place - at once terrifying, inexplicable, and true.