Footprints
Charles
Degelman
Press Release: Travelling Light
27 Millions Slaves Travelling Light or Praying for Freedom?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Contact: simonew@harvardsquareeditions.org Tel: 734-668-7523 for review copies
Susan Weinstein, swpubrel@aol.com (212) 645-4969 for interview
“The author admirably dramatizes this, using an intelligent everywoman, who sees the origins in the jealous and depersonalization of her own marriage.”
— Not Another Book Review
http://notanotherbookreview.blogspot.com/2011/05/travelling-light-by-jl-morin-harvard.html
It's a bit of humor, chick lit, history, creative nonfiction and detective story rolled into one.
— Judith Smith
With slavery set to overtake the drug trafficking industry, the novel TRAVELLING LIGHT could not be timelier. J. L. Morin, nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2011, uses her talents as a novelist to explore the contradictory reality of slavery flourishing in a tourist paradise . . . the Mediterranean island Styxos.
Mac, a naïve but driven archaeologist comes to live on Styxos with her husband and children and soon realizes that she has given up more than just a familiar way of life: She has lost the anchor of a civilization whose values she had taken for granted.
The price of paradise on Styxos is high. Mac’s husband soon reverts to the male stereotype of his homeland, and she is left adrift in an insular world of women, struggling to maintain her autonomy and a nurturing home for her children. The dreams of paradise Mac had entertained rapidly dissolve after the body of a sex slave is found in a hotel swimming pool during a highbrow investors’ gala. Using her archaeologist’s gift for unraveling ancient mystery, Mac begins an investigation that will take her to the deepest levels of myth and tradition, where international politics meets greed and corruption.
In TRAVELLING LIGHT, readers discover Styxos, the newest EU accession state, head over heels in modernization as investment pours in. Mac finds herself trapped on the lowest level of society, with her husband slipping away, unable to leave without her children. She befriends Farouk, a French businessman derailed from his ensuing marriage when he is implicated in the murder of the sex slave.
As Mac uncovers the harsh reality of sex trafficking on the island, her marriage comes to a crisis, and she must escape or fall victim to the trafficking ring. Her uncommon partnership with Farouk evolves from infatuation to a friendship more liberating than romance.
When J. L. Morin reveals the gates to hell on the fictitious island of Styxos, she also sheds a harsh light on the secret plight of victims sucked into the slave trade. With 27 million actual slaves worldwide in 2011, Morin’s fiction becomes all too real.
Many westerners assume we are progressing with freedom and equality. Not so, says Morin. The fact is, there are more slaves on earth today than at any time in human history and at least twice as many as there were at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade at the end of the 1700’s — men, women and children captured and violently forced into unpaid labor who cannot walk away.
In her 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report, Hillary Clinton confirmed slavery has endured into the modern day in the United States: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjfT3kwpXbM
More facts on 27 million slaves can be found on the U.N. Site: http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/english/detail/105955.html
The $14.95 trade paperback 5 x 8 inches, 316 pgs will be released July 31, 2011, ISBN 978-0-9833216-9-9.
J. L. MORIN
J. L. Morin, nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2011, is the author of the award-winning novel SAZZAE (Gold medal winner of the 2010 eLit Book Award, 2010 winner of a Living Now Book Award), started as a creative thesis at Harvard, followed by three novels for future publication: TRAVELLING LIGHT; POLIS; and NATURE’S CONFESSION.
Her writing has appeared in the VOICE FROM THE PLANET and ABOVE GROUND anthologies, THE HARVARD ADVOCATE, HARVARD YISEI, THE DETROIT NEWS, AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, LIVONIA OBSERVER ECCENTRIC NEWSPAPERS, and THE HARVARD CRIMSON.
J. L. Morin grew up in inner city Detroit and traded currency derivatives in New York for six years while studying nights at New York University’s Stern School of Business (MBA ‘97) culminating in a job at the Federal Reserve Bank posted to the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. In 2001, Morin took to the road, travelling to Australia as a diplomatic spouse, a way of life that fuelled her interest in the origins of cultures. After 9/11, she worked as a TV newscaster and is currently adjunct faculty at Boston University.
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