Böcker av John Enright

A city, three lives, four decades, poems, drugs, booze, hippies, love, lust, loss-- just keep moving. Some relationships linger across decades and continents, no mater how much individuals change. The links between Patrick, Joanna, Daisy, and San Francisco, though stretched, never snap. San Francisco and the Bay Area are at the heart of this story about three lives evolving over 40 years. When Patrick discovers San Francisco in the summer before the Summer of Love, he is old enough to be drafted for Vietnam, but too young to buy beer. His innocence extends from women to psychedelics. The city will tutor him. Joanna is a Bolinas poet, Daisy her 10-year-old daughter. In a world of lost families, they invent a simulacrum. The city is not just streets and seascapes, but events and the people drawn to and shaped by it. It is North Beach and the Mothers of Invention, City Lights Bookstore and LSD, Hammett's after-midnight fog and the Golden Gate. Patrick leaves and returns, leaves and returns to his default base. Patrick, Joanna, and Daisy-- their histories are entwined with the history of the city. Those were perilous, shifting times, and they rowed their boat through the heart of them.

Thor Johnson makes a profession of fighting in other people's wars. So his new assignment, training guard dogs on a Caribbean island, sounds downright relaxing. But it's not relaxing for long. The island is in the grip of a religious cult that aims to sweep the world. The cults's prophet upholds a very old-fashioned family ideal: one husband, many wives. But instead of being one big happy family, the cult is a web of jealous intrigue which soon entangles Thor. Even more entangling is a mysterious dancer. She follows Thor to the island, and soon men are fighting over who will possess her. Thor must go to war once again, battling for his life, and struggling to understand what is happening to his own soul.