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Hello, I'm an author, and my new novel, Sleep Before Evening, has some interest for those working through recovery and specifically features the 12 steps, and some clinic work in the story. There are a number of different (sometimes subtle) kinds of addiction that the book explores, but the most overt one is heroin. I've appended a press release below, but anyone who wants more information on the book, please don't hesitate to contact me. All the best. Magdalena **********************  Sleep Before Evening: A novel of the redemptive power of art and music, love, loss, ugliness and beauty.
Exciting new Generation X Literary Fiction from BeWrite Books.
Marianne is the apple of Grandpa's eye - but her life's rotten to the core.
When her parents suddenly disconnect her grandfather-mentor's respirator, it's as though her own life support has been unplugged. And the gifted teenager from a manicured, middle-class suburb hits the city back-streets, and the skids.
Magdalena Ball's heart-wrenching novel - released on 24th July 2007 by BeWrite Books - tells the story of the teenager's struggle against a self-centred artist mother, a succession of drive-by stepfathers, her desperate escape into a nightmare of drugs and sexual degradation ... and her struggle not to Sleep Before Evening.
Critically acclaimed non-fiction author, poet and reviewer Magdalena - born and raised in New York and now living in the Australian outback, via a British Oxford college - draws on her own rich life experience as a daughter and a mother to bring Marianne startlingly to life in her debut novel.
Set in and about New York, the gritty, relentless tale unfolds with the same cool detachment that motivates the central character to peel back the layers of her life and expose the painful scalding within. There are lonely vigils in city parks and subway journeys to oblivion. In the city she meets Miles, a hip musician busking the streets and playing seedy venues with a rock band.
Her new, exciting, dissolute world challenges Marianne's preconceptions about art and life. Here, in contrast to her prescribed upbringing, she finds anarchic squalor, home grown music and poetry, substance abuse, sex and crushing disappointment and fear; but above all, exhilarating personal freedom.
Addictions - of all kinds - and the redemptive power of art and music, love, loss and beauty are all explored in a young girl's difficult journey from sleep to awakening.
Early Reviews:
"The dialogue is solid and believable, and the characters live and breathe and scratch themselves. The drug scenes and the horrors of dependence are especially well-rendered." Chad Hautmann, author of Billie's Ghost
"There is so much beautiful writing here, soaring passages." Ruhama Veltfort, author of The Promised Land
"Sleep Before Evening is music. Magdalena Ball weaves the sounds of poetry with an important story, compassionately sung." Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This is the Place, and Tracings
"The writing is exquisite, without ever calling attention to itself, which is a real feat. It is a pleasure to read. The pitch is perfect, and the characters are so beautifully developed and very intriguing." Joan Schweighardt, author of Virtual Silence, Island, Homebodies and Gudrun's Tapestry
Title: Sleep Before Evening
Author: Magdalena Ball
Print ISBN: 978-1-904492-96-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-905202-97-9
Page count: 296
Release Date: 24th July 2007
BeWrite Books are available from: BeWrite Books (www.bewrite.net), Amazon (http://tinyurl.com/yq9yrq), Barnes & Noble, and on order from all high street bookshops
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Wow, that's a hefty condemnation and assessment made by just watching the trailer (I'm assuming that you haven't actually read the book). I'm sorry that the trailer strikes you that way as it certainly wasn't my intention -- I was just trying to draw in readers and give some flavour of the book. The book is about a lot more than simply (if simply is the right word) the addiction -- it's a novel, rather than a how to or a spiritual book--and is about how we make meaning in our lives, not about how to quit drugs. But blaming and self-pitying are certainly some of the issues that my protagonist (like the rest of us) has to work through in order to achieve her recovery. Perhaps posting information about the book here was inappropriate (and if so, please accept my apologies)-- as it isn't a didactic book in any sense and wasn't written specifically to provide advice for recovering addicts--again, it's a novel driven by character development and fictive truth. However, I do write from some degree of personal knowledge, and I have had such a strong positive response from the recovery community that I thought it might have been of interest. All the best. Maggie
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