Two-Hearted Crossing: A Novel

Morgan, Toni

Literature & Fiction

Adelaide Books

During the turbulent sixties, the call for Quebec independence created a political and social maelstrom in Canada. For nearly ten years, riots, bombings, labor strikes and violent street scenes—many even worse than what we’re seeing today—were part of everyday life in Montreal, the epicenter of battle. PATRIMONY represents the essence of that still-smoldering conflict. Told from the viewpoints of two brothers and a sister, PATRIMONY is about what happens in a country when political ideology resorts to terrorism. It’s about what happens in a family when one brother believes in responsible political action to achieve his goals, and the other brother, a time-bomb ticking toward an explosion, will do anything to get what he wants, including using his own sister for blackmail. From PATRIMONY’S opening chapter, a trip to North Carolina where brother and sister buy explosives from gunrunners, to a factory bombing and a symbolic attempt to blow up a bridge, the plot moves quickly. It weaves through cultural differences, family and political conflicts, and ends in an unprecedented political crisis—Quebec under martial law.

Patrimony: A Novel

In 1939, Nobuko Ito, a young Japanese-American woman, travels from her home in California to Japan, where she is to learn the culture of her ancestors. Tensions grow between the two countries. Soon her country and the country she has grown to love are at war. The next four years are brutal, both for those who go to fight (Hirotaka Katsuragawa, a young art student, Masato Abi, the son of local merchants, Toshio Hara, a farmer turned soldier), and those who remain behind (Nobuko, Yoko Yoshida, who manages the local pottery factory while her husband is fighting the war, and the women and children of Nishimi). In 1997, these characters are in their twilight years. Nobuko is a widow. Yoko is reduced to dusting and serving tea in the factory she once ran. Toshio has gone mad. Hirotaka has become the sensei, honored teacher. While the pottery factory is the heart of the village, Hirotaka is its soul. When a murder is committed, the motive is found buried beneath the rubble of a bridge destroyed in New Guinea, fifty-five years earlier. The noise of its fall still echoes...

Echoes from a Falling Bridge: A Novel (Toni Morgan Trilogy)

Virginia Franconi left home at eighteen, like the hounds of hell were nipping at my heels. Now, in her mid-twenties, she returns to the family farm in Idaho. Her sour, belligerent father, once an iron-fisted ruler, is weak and frail, no longer a threat. Marc, Virginia’s brother, runs the farm. Virginia is pregnant, a secret she doesn’t initially share with Marc or her father. With most young men off fighting the war in Europe or the Pacific, Marc worries who will help grow the food demanded by a hungry nation. When President Roosevelt orders all people of Japanese descent removed from the West Coast, Keiko Ugawa and her family find themselves in a crowded, tar-papered barrack, surrounded by barbed-wire and guard towers, where temperatures reach 130F in summer and minus 30F in winter. Dust and wind are constants. Her mother dies and Keiko’s anger at authorities intensifies. Marc’s worries about who will help him are solved when the government allows internees from nearby Camp Minidoka to work on surrounding farms. A saddened and still angry Keiko comes to the Franconi farm, along with several young men. While Keiko works in the house with Virginia, now approaching her due date, the young men join Marc in the fields. Keiko helps deliver Virginia’s baby. The two women gradually become friends.

Harvest the Wind: A novel

Genre Fiction

Lotus Blossom Unfurling: A novel

Literary

QUEENIE’S PLACE, set in rural North Carolina in the early seventies, is the story of an unusual sisterhood between a thirty-something white woman from California and a fifty-something black women from the south. From the moment Doreen Donavan sees the “Welcome to Klan Country” sign outside Goldsboro, North Carolina is one culture shock after another. She thinks the women she meets on the military base, where she and her family now live, are the dullest, stuffiest, most stuck-up women she’s ever run across, and frankly, they don’t think much of her either. She’s hot, miserable, and bored. Then one day, BAM, her car tire goes flat, right in front of a roadhouse outside the town of Richland, near where MCB Camp Puller is located. Inside, Queenie is holding forth at the piano. The place is jumping. Besides the music, there’s dancing and the best barbecue in North Carolina. Doreen’s husband, Tom arrives and must practically peel her out of the place. Queenie doesn’t expect to see Doreen again, but Doreen comes back and their unlikely friendship begins. Without warning, Queenie’s place is closed, the women accused of prostitution and bootlegging. A born crusader (she cut her teeth demonstrating against the Vietnam War—yes, even with her husband over there), Doreen quickly dons her armor and saddles up. Things don’t go quite as planned.

Queenie's Place: A novel

United States

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