On January 28, 2025, Korza Books will publish my first novel, The Last Grand Tour, and on May 13, 2025, Monkfish Publishing will publish my nonfiction book An Island to Myself: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life.
Click on the cover or title above to pre-order either book–and watch this space for upcoming news!
Here are the publishers’ descriptions of the two books:
The Last Grand Tour
American tour guide Joe Newhouse wants nothing more than to reach Venice. Since moving to Munich after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he’s watched his business fail, his wife leave him, and his love for Europe diminish. Now he faces one last ten-day tour with a surly group that doesn’t want to be there. As he leads them through the mythic lands of Europe’s Romantic past, he grows increasingly disturbed by their stories of earlier lives, puzzled by their desire to be with a man who doesn’t arrive, and entangled in an illicit affair that promises to either save him or plunge his tour-and his life-into madness.
Soaked in the Romantic atmosphere and dark deeds of old Europe-as well as the freedoms and hopes of a new era-The Last Grand Tour takes us on a perilous journey through Hitler’s Berchtesgaden, Mozart’s Salzburg, and Mad King Ludwig’s Bavarian fantasyland before reaching its stunning climax in the murky waters of Venice. Along the way, it explores the often-shifting lines between fidelity and freedom, illusion and reality, regret and desire.
$20
An Island to Myself: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life
A memoir about how solitude can deepen a life.
In his twenties, writer and activist Michael McGregor traveled to the remote Greek island of Patmos to spend two months alone. It was 1985, before cellphones or the internet, when even a phone call home was costly. Those days transformed his understanding of himself, his God, and his purpose–and in this book he offers, for others, how finding a place of solitude can change a life.
McGregor had spent three years writing about the world’s poorest people and five months traveling when he chose, at 27, to live for two months in total solitude, 6,000 miles from home. He went primarily to write a novel, but from the moment he stepped onto the ferry to begin the 11-hour ride to Patmos, he knew his time would be meaningful. As he settled into a routine that included hours of writing each day, walks through fierce wind in the evenings, and nights that brought on dreams, memories, and unexpected spiritual encounters, he soon realized that solitude can be difficult and even dangerous but also awe-inspiring and life-altering.
McGregor immerses the reader in particulars of the simple life he lived for two winter months on an island where he knew no one. He reflects on authors and spiritual teachers before showing the ways in which his returns to solitude in subsequent decades reflected or altered his earlier experiences of being alone.
In the book’s final section, McGregor returns to Patmos during the same January dates he visited four decades earlier. He attempts to replicate his earlier experience. His reflections on the changes in his life, the island world, and his understanding of both God and solitude add another dimension to this multifaceted book.
$22.95
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