Bøger af Heather Neff

"Leila II, The Moods of the Sea" Leila, the twelve-year-old daughter of illiterate parents, spent her childhood in a mud hut in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Given to three strangers in payment for her father's debts, she is forced to work in a brothel before being sold to a wealthy, prominent man. "Leila: the Weighted Silence of Memory" recounts Leila's years of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the hands of her captors. After managing to escape, she seeks to rebuild her life with a family suffering from tragic losses of their own. "Leila II, The Moods of the Sea" finds Leila three years later, still a fugitive from the man who held her captive. Though deeply haunted by her past and her fear of recapture, her hard work has brought fortune to the family that shelters her. As they try to better their lives with a new business venture, Leila takes her first steps toward healing. Her world gains new meaning when she is drawn toward a powerful, unexpected love. After a terrible coincidence delivers her again into the hands of her tormenters, Leila suffers a vicious assault that leaves her body broken. Now she must fight for herself, her future, and for everyone and everything she has come to care for. A tale of human trafficking, Leila's story illuminates the plight of more than twelve million victims held in modern-day slavery throughout the world.

In 1979, just out of college, Heather Neff moved to Paris, France. Inspired by her two-year sojourn in the place she would later describe as "the city of her soul,"The Paris Hours is a collection of poems and songs capturing some of the most powerful and meaningful moments in the young writer's life.

Saffron Bloom, a novel by Heather NeffTwo men fall in love with a girl.Then she becomes a woman. Sixteen-year-old Saffron Hunter can handle herself on the streets of Detroit. Raised by her mother, a no-nonsense nurse, and her doting grandfather, Saffron's dorky glasses, drab rags and middle-school hair hide a quick-thinking, highly perceptive girl. Saffron believes books are better than boys, so it's just dumb luck that one summer afternoon she ends up in a park sharing a joint with a bunch of kids...until one boy goes too far. What happens that afternoon intrigues Ishmael, the weed man whose past brought him from an orphanage in Kenya to the wealthiest enclaves of Detroit. Mysterious, moody, and unpredictable, Ishmael sets his sights on Saffron and slowly works his way into the girl's heart, even managing to gain the approval of her mother. Saffron and Ishmael begin an intensely erotic affair, buoyed by alcohol and drugs. Their afternoon trysts, however, mean one thing to the man, but something entirely different to the girl, who desperately tries, and painfully fails to win his love. By her 19th birthday, the streetwise ostrich has grown into a guarded, but beautiful swan. Excited by her first job and the freedom of the hot summer nights, Saffron encounters Tristan, the copper-haired bartender in a local downtown dive. Determined to protect herself from ever being hurt again, Saffron struggles against the fire the strangely engaging, secretly gifted musician ignites in her heart. Once she enters Tristan's lair, a renovated factory in the heart of the city, Saffron's resolve is lost. Never had she dreamed of such a sense of safety, instinctual understanding, and passionate devotion from anyone, much less a man whose background is so different from her own. Shunned by the outside world, Saffron and Tristan slowly build a private universe. Their relationship deepens with each passing day...until Saffron begins to uncover devastating lies and half-told truths about both Tristan and Ishmael, whose chance reappearance sets a bitter rivalry in motion that disrupts all their lives for years to come. Saffron will one day have to choose between a man who promises her wealth and prominence, and another, who is still searching for the courage to love her. Over the course of her journey she will know the loneliness of separation and the agonizing challenge of forgiveness - while she struggles to carve out her own uniquely powerful place in the world. The author of novels exploring racism, addiction, intimate partner violence, and human trafficking, in Saffron Bloom Heather Neff has composed a sweeping tale about the long and labyrinthine path to deep and enduring love. Heather Neff is the author of the award-winning works Wisdom, Haarlem, Accident of Birth, and Blissfield. Visit her author website: www.heatherneffbooks.net

Blissfield, North Carolina is a dead end town in the heart of empty. Yet days after her 15th birthday, Bethany Celeste Castle arrives in Blissfield, a fugitive from Copley Castle, her alcoholic, viciously abusive father. A witness from her earliest childhood of her father's escalating acts of violence, Bethany struggles to adapt to the quiet, small-town world of her grandmother, Corinthia Bibb Castle. Properly fed, clothed, and experiencing true stability for the first time, Bethany slowly blooms, protected by her grandmother's respected position in the community. Bethany soon meets Gideon and Nina Price, a brother and sister living alone on the outskirts of town. Bethany is drawn to Nina, whose quirky intellect and love of books matches her own. But she is also attracted to Gideon, Nina's handsome, silently watchful younger brother, whose eyes speak of secrets neither of the Prices will share. Coming to understand how poverty, a tangled family history and the treacheries of skin color have led to her friends' exile from Blissfield life, Bethany begins to question her own family story and the origins of her father's cruelty. As her friendship with the Prices deepens to love, Bethany pledges to stand by them, no matter what challenges they face, and to never, ever leave them behind.The events of one terrible afternoon force Bethany to return to Ohio, and she soon falls victim to her father's psychotic rage. Battered, broken and left for dead, Bethany faces an uphill battle to rebuild her life. At the moment when she needs then most, however, Nina, Gideon and her grandmother seem to vanish, leaving Bether to face her painful recovery alone. Fifteen years later, on receiving the news of Corinthia's death, Bethany embarks on a blind but determined quest to find the two remaining people she loves most in the world -- Gideon and Nina Price -- convinced that without them she will never be whole. Her search for the Prices uncovers acts of betrayal and deceit perpetrated generations before that set the destruction of both their families in motion.

The second in Heather Neff's trilogy of poetry collections spanning four decades of her life, VESPERS includes selected poems from the 1980s to the present. This collection addresses her years in Switzerland, her career as a writer and professor, and her reflections on the extraordinary, joyful experience of motherhood.

Twelve year old Leila knows little more of the world than the view from her family's mud-brick hut on the steep slopes of the Atlas Mountains. Her greatest hope is to marry the son of the village shopkeeper and to live like all the women who came before her. Leila's dreams are destroyed in one night when three strangers take her in payment for her father's debts. Thus begins her long journey into silence: the silence of a child sold to a brothel in a distant city. The silence of a young woman passed on to a judge who exploits her as his servant. The silence of a barely literate woman who suffers years of rape, beatings and hunger. Leila survives by clinging to memories of her mountain village and the love of her mother. When she meets two sisters determined to improve women's lives she gains her first glimmering of hope ⎯ and the courage to take her freedom. After a harrowing escape she slowly reclaims her life through the love of a family facing their own search for healing.

"The only thing that'll last forever is my Thirst . . . .”So says Abel Crofton as he explores the streets and canals of Amsterdam. A New York tunnel worker who's struggling to stay sober after years of alcoholism, Abel is searching for the mother he's never known. Despite having few clues as to her whereabouts, he soon finds a bureaucratic trail that takes him to Haarlem, the Dutch town from which the famed African-American neighborhood takes its name. As Abel ventures into more new territory, he also takes on his identity as a Black man, his rough childhood in Harlem, New York, his relationship to his bitter father, and his battle with addiction. The questions around his life only get more complicated after he meets a coldly direct waitress and a ragged jazz musician, both also bearing major scars from their pasts. The road leads to Haarlem for them as well. Welcome to Abel's search for salvation in another tight page turner from Heather Neff.