banner  
 
 
home books e-books audio books recent titles with blogs
   
   
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Welcome to My New Blog

Posted on 23 September 2011, 22:13

I am delighted to announce that White Crow Books will be publishing my novel The Imprisoned Splendor in a November 2011.

splendor

It’s a story about a man forced to come to terms in the afterlife with the foolish and selfish mistakes he made on earth.  Kiran is a gifted but self-absorbed college professor who grew up in Bombay (or Mumbai) and came to America to make a name for himself and get rich. Working at a leading California university, he gains national prominence as a professional philosopher. He lives in a conflicted marriage with Lisa, a glamorous but superficial American, but this union comes to an abrupt end on a visit home when he dies in a plane crash. We live through his horror as he watches death and annihilation gallop toward him, and we feel his amazement when he discovers he’s still alive in a world he was certain could not exist.  Now he must face his karma, and that will be harrowing. He relives the events of his life not as he experienced them, but as his victims did—his students, his fellow workers, above all the women who loved him. Eventually he seeks out Shalini.  Many years ago she committed suicide after he rejected her in favor of her rival, Lisa. Shalini had been a gifted cellist, promising student of literature, and devotee of Sylvia Plath, whose suicide she copied. Working under the guidance of his saintly grandmother, the indomitable Plath, and several others (all now in spirit), Kiran, facing heavy odds, attempts to rescue Shalini from the murky Shadowlands in a dramatic climax to the story.  Descriptions of the afterworld based on spirit communications provide the setting.

THE IMPRISONED SPLENDOR is much more than a paranormal romance novel.  It’s also a “message book”—like Richard Matheson’s afterlife novel What Dreams May Come, still widely read after thirty years.  I hope readers will be intrigued by the spirit-charged world they find here—with its unfamiliar laws and culture, its vivid landscapes and astral cities, and its lessons for common earth dwellers like us as we look toward our own future beyond death.  This is not a religious book—no Jesus or Krishna found here.  But it does have a strong spiritual dimension.  It talks with compassion to wounded, struggling human beings, and it suggests that the Universe, moral to the core, holds us accountable for our actions in a world that many of us, like Kiran, don’t even suspect exists.

This will be my third novel, following The Rich Man (St. Martin’s) and Thomas (Penguin India).  I teach world religions and death studies at a California university.

The Imprisoned Splendor


Comments

Greetings; I’m about a third of the way into your novel and I must tell you how wonderful I think it! I’ve read (or tried to read) every one of the few novels I’ve stumbled upon with similar intent, and there’s no question that for me, yours towers above the rest, in every way, but particularly for the quality of the writing, and the poignancy of the insight. I expected to find the setting and the details of that the most interesting element. But as I read, I’m struck over and over with that startling sense of universality, even intimate recognition, that I’ve only ever found in the finest writing. Dare I use the word “literature”?:) A thousand thanks, both for this work, and for your others that I’m now exploring. And for the passion, honesty and depth you bring to this entire essential topic.

David Coffin, Mon 4 Feb, 07:02


Add your comment

Name

Email

Your comment

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Please enter the word you see in the image below:


Please note that all comments are read and approved before they appear on the website

 
translate this page
feature
“Life After Death – The Communicator” by Paul Beard – If the telephone rings, naturally the caller is expected to identify himself. In post-mortem communication, necessitating something far more complex than a telephone, it is not enough to seek the speakers identity. One needs to estimate also as far as is possible his present status and stature. This involves a number of factors, overlapping and hard to keep separate, each bringing its own kind of difficulty. Four such factors can readily be named. Read here
© White Crow Books | About us | Contact us | Privacy policy | Author submissions | Trade orders