A wasted world. A dictator. A hounded bankster. A forsaken child. The redemption of two lives. But what would happen when then came that day...?
Now humankind has been wracked by one crisis too many. And Alias R. Martin, wanted and hiding, fearful and alone, is lost to himself. That is until the day he unbiddenly finds, among the throngs of refugees, a hapless little girl. Impulsively, in spite of himself and the danger incurred, he takes her back to his hotel. A senseless mistake. A further step against the new laws. But Rebecca inchmeal becomes the revelation; the love of his life, his daughter. His only goal then, in the course of their flight against adversity, alone against relentless foes, will be to save her, whatever the cost, including murder when the ghouls of her past resurface. Part coming-of-age tale, part father-daughter adoption story, part speculative thriller, An Orphan's Whooshicree intensely extolls the impassioned parental bonds that inflame our instinctive yearning for a safe haven where to harbour ourselves, our kin and our emotions.
A novel pursuing the thematic vein of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Andrew Krivak's The Bear, Paulette Jiles's News of the World, or still Kimi Cunningham-Grant's These Silent Woods.
The forlorn child leads the tale in hundreds of literary works. And here is yet one more, by my hand, whose timeworn motive's excuse I am to clarify. We may wonder why this figure has repeatedly monopolised so many novels. What is it that imbues the dejected whelp with this odd attractiveness, that justifies their hold on so many writers, and among whom paragons of the art, and centuries since? Must it be that the marooned youngling opens in our souls that gaping wound, that foundational fear of abandonment and loss deep within our bosom, and all at once that primaeval need to shelter, to cradle the crestfallen, and by this move of fosterage reassert the nucleus of our humanity? For some of us, anyhow? At all events, here lies the rationale for this narrative, "An Orphan's Whooshicree". Not far from now this takes place, hardly in the future in fact. Maybe just marginally a fiction, though it is a novel, with names of lands and towns absent from maps, and characters who both but extend my own terrors and qualms, aspirations and reveries. Embodiments of fragments of my mind. In one of its nooks, a stray I remain, deep within myself, and elsewhere inside me the rescuer. Somewhere between the jilted little girl and the safeguarding carer of the story. Nothing original, nothing groundbreaking, just something that should be happening over and over in so many places. Silently, unheard of. A blighted person uplifting the life of a lost kid. And love overtaking the two. Incrementally a parent and a child by heartstring, a fluid stronger than blood, redeeming each other. And the pair on the wrong side of history, of course. But it had to be written, if only to purge the untenable unease instilled in me by what we euphemise as the human condition, to burst open the shutters of darkness to the light beyond, but that actually shines, if ever it does, at the back of our minds.
