THE LAST BIRD OF PARADISE wins Maxy Award

I was very pleased to learn yesterday that my most recent novel, The Last Bird of Paradise, has won an award for Literary Fiction, the Maxy Award. The award is a little unusual in that it recognizes very recent or forthcoming titles as opposed to books published in the previous calendar year, which is the norm. The novel will also be considered for some of those recognitions as well.

The Last Bird of Paradise, which came out in February, is a novel about two women who move, reluctantly, to Singapore. One of the women is a New York lawyer who arrives in the country in 2002 when her husband accepts a job with the Singapore office of a global investment bank. In the process of settling in, she acquires antique paintings done by the other woman, an English artist who was sent in 1914 from England to Singapore, then a British Colony, to live with her uncle. The women have somewhat parallel lives, with global tensions giving rise to violence in both time periods. As one reviewer noted, the book is “part history, part romance, part corporate intrigue,” so there’s something for everyone.

The book is available at Amazon, of course, and can be ordered at your favorite independent bookstore.