New Brett Halsey Book

Teenage Luis and his pregnant young love, Carolina, run away from their homes in Seville, Spain, to escape the wrath of her father. Caught and beaten nearly to death, Carolina loses their child and Luis is spirited off to a monastery and becomes a devout priest. Fate carries him to California where ‘Padre’ Luis exerts a major influence over the lives of all he meets. Especially Ramona and Dolores, two orphaned sisters who sail with him from Spain to the New World.

MY SOUL TO KEEP is a sweeping saga of passionate women and their men at odds with the tragedy of their changing times. Their story, set in 19th Century California, follows one family’s fight to survive forbidden love – ugly prejudice - the decline of Mexico’s power – bitter war - the destruction of Indian tribal society – and the ever-increasing swarm of white Americans, coming to settle their newly formed State.

Format: Kindle Edition

File Size: 492 KB

Publisher: BookLocker.com, Inc. (August 31, 2011)

Sold by: Amazon Digital Services

Language: English

ASIN: B005KMBIPY

Text-to-Speech: Enabled

Lending: Enabled

 

Brett Halsey's third novel represents a significant literary advance on his first two enjoyable best-sellers, The Magnificent Strangers and Yesterdays Children. Those novels utilised his own experience as an expatriate movie star and a TV soap opera regular but My Soul to Keep is even more personal in some ways, exploring the milieu of his Californian ancestors (some of his ancestors owned half of the San Fernando Valley and his great-great-grandfather was Mayor of Los Angeles). It is written with passion. Many years in composition (he was hard at work at it when I first met him in 2005), this finely-achieved narrative explores some serious themes but wears its considerable research lightly and, like his earlier books, is a fun read. His vivid description gives the book a cinematic quality and it would certainly make an engrossing movie or a lavish TV mini-series. Recommended. – Napoleon, London, England