NOVELS

SLOW REVEAL— “A poem is never finished, only abandoned,” wrote Paul Valéry, an outcome echoed in the ten year on/off extramarital affair between Katharine, a film editor and Naomi, a lesbian poet. Set in NY in the 90s, art, addiction and family dysfunction culminate in Katharine’s attempt to reconcile her marriage and face the confrontations with her two grown daughters, an artist and an addict. Art is front and center in the novel. The precariousness of the artistic process is as risky, messy and unpredictable as building intimacy and trust in love. Devotion and commitment are not the guard rails that keep a work or a relationship on track but rather a form of entrapment. ...MORE

THE EXPAT  - A meditation on platonic love during turbulent times. On Inauguration Day 2017, a Millennial photographer boards a Greyhound for Canada. When she arrives in Montreal, she meets a gay music producer in his 70s. Their dynamic, intergenerational friendship defies the conventions of ageism and empowers their activism in a charged political climate where the future of both young and old are at stake.

PARADISE AT H/ER FEET - Neurochemist Azra Kiani returns to Pakistan on a Global Health grant to study mental health conditions at madrassas. While there she meets Yusef, a vulnerable, adolescent boy, whom she adopts  and brings back to the U.S.  When her research on a holistic treatment for depressive disorders finally proves out and the study is published in the Journal of Psychiatry, she's abducted. Fearing for their safety, her colleague flees  to Montreal with her son. The story shuttles back and forth between Azra's attempts to identify her abductors and locate her son, and the painstaking process of Yusef who sheds his fundamentalist ideals to navigate the minefield of her transgender identity. 

SEPTEMBER 10TH– A shell-shocked architect disappears after 9/11 in pursuit of anonymity on the streets of New York. From the alienation of homelessness, the novel moves into the private lives of a family unexpectedly reunited. ...MORE

HOUSE OF DISCONTENT examines the elusive nature of intimacy. The novel opens in New York with the implosion of a 23-year marriage. When their steady course is rocked by conflict, they attempt to pump some oxygen back into their relationship, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. The dilemma of rebellion or revival brings them to those untidy places, surrounded by wreckages of the past, the beast of the present and the oblivion of a future they cannot own.

 
SHORT-STORY COLLECTION

 
DEATH DEFYING ACTS--Stories that speak to the indomitable human spirit. An unlikely character from one story becomes the central character of the next. A young woman writes her obituary, her will, a press release about her death before she commits suicide. While fixated on reruns of the Sopranos, an elderly man has a heart attack and a near death experience with Tony Soprano. After a long, protracted bout of cancer, a woman succumbs to the afterlife. A young hacker has an affair with a suburban housewife after she pushes him out of the way of an oncoming bus. A cat runs away from home after her owner does a hit and run, killing a beloved deer she had befriended. A man who loves his juice is given a second chance by his reformed lover. A terminally ill man is harangued by his two best friends who insist on expediting his death as he had instructed, only to be confronted by a change of heart. A desk clerk at a hotel in East Bumfuck falls in love with a man who has come to purchase a red Jaguar in the waning days of his struggle with AIDS. ...MORE