Bøger af Donigan Merritt

Captain Franklin Hatcher was a Special Forces operative in Southeast Asia in the earliest days of what would become the war in Vietnam. Leading a secret mission in the jungles of Laos, his team was caught in an ambush and all killed, with Captain Hatcher, called Hatch, left barely alive by mistake. Betrayed by his own commander, with no one to trust, Hatch vanished into the tropical forest and became a mad part of it. After finding the young woman he loved slaughtered in the village, Hatch limps out of the mountains, across the valleys, out of the jungle, out of the country, out of the war, and out of the way of the civilized world. Twenty years later, chased through the world's tropical seas by his inner demons, Hatch has come to live quietly in a shack he built with his own hands on the South Pacific island of Tuva, fishing and scrounging for a living, having found some measure of peace. He finds love again in the hopes of a young island girl who worships him as a hero for saving her life. But when a casual encounter with the crew of an American yacht reveals the secrets of his past, Hatch is about to pay the price of survival. The Last Island is a story of good and evil, innocence and corruption, within the narrative thread of a tragic, yet beautiful, love story, played out within the natural ambiguity of human feeling.

Possessed by Shadows is the story of two climbers who spend a year traveling from the rugged desert of Joshua Tree National Park to the Alps, the Himalayas, and the High Tatra mountains of Czechoslovakia.Philosophy professor Tom Valen narrates part of their story: the time he spent climbing with his wife, Molly, as she fought cancer. He also explores the journal she kept during the emotional period before her death, which occurred in the weeks before the Velvet Revolution in late 1989.Told in alternating voices as Tom relives that year, Molly's journal reveals compulsions that he never suspected, her romantic life from adolescence into adulthood, and a shocking revelation about Stefan, a fellow climber who had once saved Tom's life. In the final scene of the novel, the three old friends climb the highest mountain in the Tatras one last time, where they find a kind of redemption in the face of impending death.Possessed by Shadows is a tribute to selfless love and the bonds of friendship forged in the extremes of high mountains. It confronts us with the ultimate philosophical challenge: since we must die, how do we choose to live?