New books by Peace Corps writers | January — February 2024

To purchase any of these books from Amazon.com — CLICK on the book cover, the bold book title, or the publishing format you would like — and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance from your purchase that will help support the site and the annual Peace Corps Writers awards.

We include a brief description for each of the books listed here in hopes of encouraging readers  to order a book and/or  to VOLUNTEER TO REVIEW IT.

 See a book you’d like to review for Peace Corps Worldwide? Send a note to Marian at marian@haleybeil.com, and she will send you a free copy along with a few instructions.

P.S. In addition to the books listed below, I have on my shelf a number of other books whose authors would love for you to review. Go to Books Available for Review to see what is on that shelf.

Please, please join in our Third Goal effort and volunteer to review a book or books!!!

Novel

American Seasons
by Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala 1991-93)
Main Street Rag Publisher
228 pages
June 2024
$18.95 (Paperback)  (*Buy now at a pre-publication discount of $10.95)

The early 1960s. A small college. An ambitious basketball coach. His young, idealistic, beautiful wife. Two star-players, one black, one white. The sports editor who hopes to chronicle a championship season. All goes well…until it doesn’t.

Memoir

From Mountains to Medicine: Scaling the Heights in Search of My Calling
by Erica M. Elliott, M.D. (Ecuador 1974–1976)
Lammastide Publishing
January 2024
383 pages
$19.95 (paperback), $16.99 (Kindle)

From Mountains to Medicine is the story of Erica Elliott’s magical, mind-bending, and heart-opening journey of self-discovery in search of her life’s purpose.

Teen biking

8 U.S. Bike Tours Historical Routes
by Stephen Foehr (Ethiopia 1965-66)
Fohr + Son Publisher
12–18 years
January 2024
233 pages
$6.99 (Kindle); $12.00 (Paperback)

8 U.S. Bike Tours Historical Routes is a travel book, not a guide book.Routes are given historical context so you are knowledgeable about the place.

Novel

Out of Season
Tom Gilroy (Senegal 1973–75)
BooXAI (A new publisher that uses artificial intelligence for many of the chores (proofreading, formatting, cover design, etc.)
December 2023
410 pages
$16.99 (paperback); $8.99 (Kindle)

Out of Season is a fictional account of the three-way interplay among the intelligence services, but includes many real facts and events of the 1980s.

The novel also looks at the legacy of colonialism and its corrosive effects on the native populations; the relative power of beliefs; and how seemingly small choices made in anger can have life-altering consequences.

Writing/Peace Corps

Wordman
P. F. Kluge (Micronesia 1967-69)
Peace Corps Writers
January 2024
204 pages
$22.00 (paperback)

The summation of a distinguished career in writing fiction, writing for film, travel writing, and teaching, P.F. Kluge’s WORDMAN is a source book for emerging writers and a memorable set of reflections upon a life spent as a journalist, author, and teacher. Kluge’s service in the Peace Corps in the early 1960s provided an unexpected geographic focus that has accrued to a lifetime of novels and creative nonfiction.

Series Mystery

Betrayal: A Robin Lockwood Novel
Phillip M. Margolin (Liberia 1966–67)
Minotaur Books
November 2023
304 pages
$9.99 (paperback), $14.99 (Kindle), $23.97 (hardbound)

In Phillip Margolin’s Betrayal, attorney Robin Lockwood finds herself defending her old nemesis in a multiple murder case with too many suspects, where success might cost her own life.

PC experience & country history

Afghanistan: Crossroads and Kingdoms — My 1970s Peace Corps Service and Recent Afghan History
by Guy Toby Marion (Afghanistan 1971-75)
Peace Corps Writers Books
January 2024
280 pages
$21.95 (Paperback); $8.95 (Kindle)

Toby Marion’s memoir of his Peace Corps service in Afghanistan from 1971 to ’75 describes working in Kapisa province as a science teacher supervisor for two years followed by three semesters teaching in the faculty of engineering at Kabul University during a time when Afghanistan experienced a coup d’etat and was moving closer to the USSR, while America was struggling with a loss in the Viet Nam War.

A novel

Dylan
by David J. Mather (Chile 1968–70)
Peace Corps Writers
January 2024
306
$14.95 (paperback); $7.99 (Kindle)

Donald MacGregor is an American writer who values his freedom above all else. He wants no responsibilities. He travels to the quiet Honduran Bay Islands to finish writing a blockbuster novel. On New Year’s Eve, however, he makes a big mistake with his beautiful neighbor, and a year later a black baby boy is delivered to his doorstep.

The heart of the novel is the two different father-son relationships. One is heartwarming throughout, the other has to go full circle to mend.

Nature

A Bouquet of Days: Rambles through the Natural Beauties of Florida
by Fran Palmeri (Benin 1967–68)
Blurb
200 pages
January 2024
$32.87 (paperback)

Explore not just Florida’s magnificent beaches but the fabled swamp of Okefenokee, and parks lush with rare wildflowers. Pelican “comics”, roseate spoonbills and friendly Florida scrub jays are just a few of the birds you’ll meet in her essays and colorful photographs of everyone’s “fountain of youth.”

Race in the South

Across the Kentucky Color Line:
Cultural Landscapes of Race from The Lost Cause to Integration
by Lee Durham Stone (Jamaica (1979-82)
Self Published
December 2023
300 pages
$7.99 (Kindle); $27.00 (Hardback)

Historical topics include Kentucky’s post-Civil War racial strife, the Jim Crow era, Lost Cause politics, and a detailed examination of a trial and public “legal lynching” in 1907. Separate chapters treat Western Kentucky’s endemic violence and the secretive Possum Hunter reign of terror in the early twentieth century.

YA Mystery

The Chinese Detective: Hawaii’s Real Charlie Chan
by Joseph Theroux (Samoa 1975-78)
Kilauea Publications
January 2024
228 pages
$5.00 (Kindle); $12.00 (Paperback)
Reading Age 15 and up

Is Honolulu Sheriff Charles Rose merely incompetent or is he an active conspirator in an opium ring?

Novel

Burma Sahib: A Novel
by Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65)
Mariner Books
February 2024
400 pages
$14.99 (Kindle); $30.00 (Hardback);  1 Credit (Audio book)

This novel explores one of English literature’s most beloved and controversial figures — George Orwell — and his early years as an officer in colonial Burma that transformed him from Eric Blair, the British Raj policeman, into Orwell, the anticolonial writer.

A Peace Corps experience

Eyes to See Africa: From the Verandahs of Sierra Leone
by Judith Kinney Thiele (Sierra Leone 1985-87)
Self Published
February 2024
471 pages
$4.99 (Kindle); $23.00 (Paperback)

I hope that you will read my book and ride on my shoulders through some of the best and worst days of my life. It was inspired from living and working as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone prior to the eleven-year war that shattered life across the land.

Mystery

Splintered Loyalty: An Ava Rome Mystery
by Mark Troy (Thailand 1972–75)
Down & Out Books
318 pages
May 2023
$19.99 (paperback); $7.99 (Kindle)

Seventy-five years following the internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry, an elderly Nisei hires Ava Rome to find out how his best friend, a Japanese-American Buddhist priest, died in the Tule Lake Internment Camp.

Peace Corps novel

Finding Miss Fong
by James A. Wolter (Malaya 1961-63)
Atmosphere Press
382 pages
November 2023 (pre-order available)
$ 18.99 (paperback); $27.99 (hardcover); $8.99 (Kindle)

Based on the author’s own life, this novel will provide the reader with what a 22-year-old college graduate was thinking, doing and imagining at the turn of the decade just as President John F. Kennedy issued the first call for Peace Corps Volunteers.