A sensitive, heart-warming yet heartbreaking interview with Lesley Lowe author of Autumn Gold: A Rendezvous with Cancer, Knowing Death is Not Final. When her beautiful and brilliant daughter Vashti was diagnosed with the rare blood cancer Multiple Myeloma at age 31 Lesley was by her side every moment, including through two bone marrow transplants. Revealing with pain-filled accuracy Vashti’s grueling journey this interview and book is also a journey of love between mother and daughter who share a grounded spiritual awareness of life after death and also a delicious and poignant love story between Vashti and her once lost first love who comes back into her life at the perfect moment. www.33greyhound.com
Listen and be transported to the excitement, cafes, and art of the bohemian Left Bank of 1920’s Paris with author Kerri Maher who literally embodies the spirit and mind of courageous bookseller Sylvia Beach. In her new novel, The Paris Bookseller, Maher weaves the true story of the creation of the famous bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, and Sylvia’s intrepid saga to overcome censorship to publish the first edition of James Joyce’s groundbreaking Ulysses and “smuggle” it into prohibition-era New York City.
A sumptuous novel, taste “forbidden” love and delicious food, and sit in Beach’s wonderful bookstore with the “cultural creatives” of their time, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and of course Joyce himself. How does an historical novelist bring her legendary characters to life? www.kerrimaher.com
A poignant interview to commemorate World Holocaust Remembrance Day with Canadian composer and author Stella ter Hart. As a child, Stella knew nothing about her family’s horrific recent past, nor of her Jewish heritage. However, no secret is safe forever as the sub-title to her book, Discovering Twins, warns us. Part memoir, part biography, and part vividly re-imagined true stories, Stella discovers first through whispers and then through ancestral web site myheritage.com, not only the extraordinary prevalence of twins in her family, but that more than 1,200 members of her family perished in Auschwitz-Berkenau and labor camps including most of the sweet twins.
Her mother, born in Holland, had been trained in childhood never to reveal that she was half-Jewish and her deception was the only thing that saved her life as her cousins, aunts and uncles were rounded up and transported to hell. Weaving skillfully back and forth between present day and 1940’s Amsterdam and filled with photographs of happy, loving families lost to the Nazi gas chambers, Discovering Twins is honest, graphic, and beautifully written. Stellaterhart.com