2026 Updates
Dear friends and readers: updates!
My writing journey began when I was five years old when I wrote a poem to a local pony-ride pinto. I never intended to be a novelist. In 1960, as the Mau Mau Rebellion was coming to a close in East Africa, I read an article about the port city of then Tanganyika, Dar es Salaam, and learned the name meant "Haven of Peace." I asked myself what if three very different people met in that city during that troubled time and were struggling with their roles in the conflict, which swelled into that country from Kenya after it started in 1952?
I could not get the words down fast enough, on an old typewriter with white-out for mistakes on the page! Once to Every Man was not published until 2013, but after that those three original characters led me to follow them, their children and grandchildren, friends and enemies through loves and euphorias, losses and betrayals, histories and dreams from those beginnings until 2041. Yes, I followed them into the future.
I was driven to say everything those characters needed to say and accept the strangeness and the beauty of their sometimes wounded lives. It took three more published novels and one unpublished manuscript to finish what I call my African series. During those years, I wrote four more, what I thought would be unrelated novels, but there had been an African character who had been taken from his family on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania to live on a Nevada Ranch where an entirely new family struggles with their own tragedies. The African gives his life to them and never sees children again (Almost Paradise and Dancing in the Red Snow).
In those days of writing through the night, writing on airplanes, writing in church, writing through community meetings, and writing in workshops, I tried creating short stories, and one of those first stories became a novella, William and Angela: a Quantum Crossing, and then two novels, Applause and The Girl from the River.
Finally, I took a deep breath in 2024 and reread and re-envisioned three of my works. I suppose the writing workshops were getting into my head, and I found myself dissatisfied with some of the language and earlier characterizations. In one novel I had used the adjective "terrible" twenty-six times! I won't tell you which one, but twenty-four of them are gone in the new publication.
Thirst still follows Suzanna and Askari out of the village of Huzuni in Tanzania, where Suzanna and her childhood friend, Safina, have been hiding with Safina's mother and father, Dakimu, from Suzanna's step-father, Major Fulsom Farley, who has been trailing Dak for fourteen years for the murder of Suzanna's father and grandfather, which occurred in Once to Every Man and Ark for the Brokenhearted (my first two African novels). For the sake of the children, a truce has been formed between Farley and Dak whereby the lie is spread that Farley has killed Dakimu and is bringing his step-daughter home unharmed. What is new about the 2025 version is the way the love triangle between Safina, Suzanna, and Suzanna's now husband Askari affects everyone's lives and the inclusion of more explosive scenes and emotions.
The Forgiveness Warrior, also newly published in 2025, previously titled What Love Has Done, follows Kivuli's year on a Northeastern Nevada ranch with the family that took her great-grandfather from his wife and children off the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater to their cattle and guest ranch, where he would die before Kivuli was born. The Tanzanian patriarch, loved by three generations of the ranching Roses, kept a note meant for Hank Rose that could have thwarted the kidnapping of the Rose's daughter, Sunny. Kivuli's discovery of this mistake and her relationship with Sunny - an adult with a child of her own, leads to the African teen's passion to understand if forgiveness is possible between the victim and the abductor, who is now residing in the Nevada State Womens Prison. This theme is more fully developed with deeper insight into the heart of the woman perpetrator and the people whose lives she damaged. This novel, under the previous title, won "Best Coming-of-Age" and "Best Fiction" in two different years of book awards.
The Girl from the River, first published in 2018, has the most drastic revision of all! You who have read the older novel will barely recognize it. Please find the January 21, 2026 version, and let me know what you think. I'll send a paperback free to the first 20 folks who will write a review. The novel is set in Southern California, where a senior music and physics major comes face to face with a character from one of her mother's famous novels in the turbulent early spring San Gabriel River. The story takes place in the 21st century, but characters like the girl-from-the river, a lover she had in a 1983 fiction, the figure of a slaver from Portuguese East Africa, and a little girl who is mauled by a lion in Tanzania and is the sole survivor of a plane crash believe they have come from, or at least know of, a passageway that connects them to different dimensions as far back as 16th century. The theme regards the possibilities of Quantum Theory as explanations for their existence in modern times and their complicated ties to the modern protagonists. This genre of novel is sometimes called "magic realism" or "speculative fiction", but I aimed to make this story as believable as possible while opening it to fantastical interpretations of the quantum realm. This one may be on store shelves soon!
The Dancing Collar is my last novel in the African series, as yet unpublished. On Kivuli's 20th birthday, a former teacher from Nevada shows up without notice on the Farley's doorstep in Dar es Salaam to discern if their mutual attraction six years earlier has any substance to build on. But their paths diverge as Kivuli learns the identity of Mvua's mother, Amira, the one person who could forgive Suzanna for killing her daughter, and the widowed teacher is attracted to Safina, who is still living in an intimate relationship with Suzanna and Askari. Tension ensues when Amira arrives in Dar with a necklace taken from Mvua's dead body and plans a dark revenge on her daughter's killer. This is the novel that ends in the future with the best ending of all my novels.
I write because I believe the stories of fictional characters and the immersed readers of those stories should have good endings, something they can take away with them for facing tragedy and deceit in the world, some trust in the possibilities of joy in the most diverse and difficult of human experiences.
Liz