Wednesday 5 March 2008

If good Americans go to Paris where do bad Americans go when they die?

The Kingdom of Heaven has been downsized to a single city. And to save overcrowding and overwork, a semi-retired God has a new chosen race and tight set of entry qualifications.

In the modern hereafter only good Americans go to Paris when they die!

But not even a divinely ordered bureaucracy is infallible and five not-so-good Americans find themselves posthumously thrown together and trapped in a surreal limbo:

Randy 1900s marine Louis Forster;
Maggie Thompson, an over-sexed 1930s fan dancer;
neurotic 1940s New York intellectual Seymour Stein;
Helen Ricchi, the mysterious and bookish wallflower suspected of foul play after her husband’s disappearance in the 1950s;
and modern-day Las Vegas boor, truck driver Max Pilsudski.

And the ill-assorted desperate departed will stop at nothing in a seemingly impossible quest to return to the land of the living and repair flawed lives and fractured loves.

Heaven and Hell share a fragile frontier in Howard Waldman’s masterfully woven novel of profound humanity and lethally-honed humor.

Following on the heels of his genre-defying Back There, Time Travail and The Seventh Candidate, Waldman produces an odyssey that combines horror with romance, science fiction with theology, sex with politics, dark humour with slapstick … it is all of these, yet none of these.

Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die is something unique in fiction, mixing George Orwell with Douglas Adams (a dash of Dante and Dali for seasoning) and producing a thundering new author voice that is so much greater than the sum of its parts.

Howard Waldman’s track record for independence in the increasingly genre-driven world of popular authorship excels even itself in a brave new novel born of stretching the imagination to breaking point – and then, somehow, stretching it still further by adding to the impossible the magic ingredient of the probable.

Waldman – an American academic living reclusively in a remote part of France – vows that Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die will be his final novel. He wants to grow roses now.

Should this be his last book, we should make the very most of the four outstanding novels created by this maestro of literary fiction and scent the flowers.


Good Americans To Paris When They Die
ISBN: 978-1-904492-98-3
Price: £9.50
Pages: 364
Release Date: 26th March 2008

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