A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa - Softcover

If you are like me, you sometimes wonder if what a person DOESN'T TELL is more important than what she does tell.  I was inspired to write this book when my mother gave me a copy of a diary kept by a white woman who spent three years in West Africa, from 1853-1856.  The diary was so sparse that even when tragedy struck, the writer recorded only two to three sentences, just enough for me to know her heart was broken.  But she didn't show that.  She showed herself plowing ahead with her "mission."  

The more research I did and the more I uncovered, the less satisfied I was sticking with the facts. And so my book became a novel.  Somewhere along the way, I decided that my heroine would need a writing box to hold her diary.  So I made one (or rather, I had her husband make one for her) and I wrote it into the novel.  About a year later, I traveled to the hometown of the historical woman who kept the diary.  I found the town historian who happened to be the town florist (!).  He knew the cemetary of course.  He also knew a distant relative of the diarist who had left her unfinished story of the 1850s! The relative invited me into her house.  And before I knew what was happening, she said, "I have some things I think you would like to know about.  I bet you would like to see the writing box."  I nearly fell over!  I had reached the point from which "there is no longer any turning back."  

I hope you enjoy reading Emma's story as much as I enjoyed writing it!

"A beautiful novel, exquisitely written, perfectly complex, true to the past, relevant today, unforgettable."  --Philip F. Deaver, author of Silent Retreats, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction