Book Title: Hearts Set Free
Genre: Literary Fiction/ Historical/Christian
ISBN-10 : 1098511093
ISBN-13 : 978-1098511098
A
graduate with a degree in music from Columbia University, Jess Lederman is an
author of Christian-themed fiction who lives with his wife and two young sons
in the Pacific Northwest.
He
is currently at work on a novel that begins in the last days of the Wild West
and ends in Las Vegas in 1955. When Jess is not writing or chasing his young
sons around, he can usually be found at the piano playing Chopin nocturnes for
his wife, Ling.
Seven Lives Inexorably Intertwined. Over Eighty-Six Years. That Will Bring a Revelation Beyond What Any of Them Could Imagine.
The Alaska Territory, 1925. When Yura Noongwook’s husband abandons her and her thirteen-year-old son, she vows to win him back and destroy the woman who stole his heart. They embark on an epic cross-country quest that leads them to the Nevada desert, where they meet a man who has turned into the last thing anyone expected him to become …
David Gold. Reno, 1930. A Bible-school dropout known as the Pummelin’ Preacher. His boxing career is fading, just like his faith. But then a former call girl shows up, tells him about the rag-tag congregation she’s part of; how their pastor was murdered. And that the Spirit is moving and David’s destiny is to lead their tiny flock.
Las Vegas, 2011. Cable TV star Tim Faber is an atheist bent on proving God is only alive in people’s imaginations. But Joan Reed, his producer, is trying to recapture the faith of her youth. And both of them are driven to unravel a mystery surrounding the Big Bang theory, never dreaming the answer will forever change their lives.
To do that, they have to meet with the now 99-year-old Luke Noongwook and David Gold’s grandson, Daniel.
The veil is being pulled back, but none of them are prepared for what they’ll find on the other
side.
Read my review here.
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Chapter One
Luke and Yura: The Alaska Territory, 1925
My father deserted my mother and me when I was thirteen years
old. He had become famous that winter on the Great Race of Mercy, one
of the Athabascan mushers who brought diphtheria serum to Nome
and saved ten thousand lives. He’d done the impossible, a blind run in
the howling darkness, crossing the open ice of the Norton Sound, the
temperature falling to sixty below, the sun a distant dream. He was our
hero, our North Star.
And then he was gone.
He left us, of course, for a woman. A blizzard had hit him at
Unalakleet, a storm so powerful that it travelled four thousand miles,
till at last it reached New York and froze the Hudson River. The woman
lived in just that far-away land, on the wild island of Manhattan, and
her name was Kathleen Byrne. The Hearst papers had been giving the
Great Race front-page headlines; Kathleen was a reporter, lean and
hungry, she’d go to the ends of the earth for a good story, and one day
she got her chance.
No one in my hometown of Nenana had seen anything like her,
a slender redhead with emerald eyes, smoking Lucky Strikes and
exhaling expertly through her nostrils, this coolly confident young
woman with fiery hair.
She wanted details that would bring the story to life, so Father
brought her to our home to show off his sled dogs. At least, the ones
who’d survived, for three he had raised since they were pups had died
on the trail. Somewhere in the madness of that journey he’d forgotten
to cover their groins with rabbit skins, and they’d perished of frostbite
in the unfathomable cold.
I gaped at her stupidly.
“Excuse my son,” said my mother. “He has no manners.”
