After admiring UCLA's popular English professor and poet, Dr. William Langley for eleven years, twenty-seven-year-old graduate student Sela Hart is finally accepted into one of his exclusive creative writing classes. She has had her own work published and studied in Africa, and he has had a stressful twenty-year marriage to a lesbian woman while struggling to balance his world with the demands of academia. But the forty-year-old Langley is intrigued by Sela's strange stories, while she is drawn to his emotional reeling at the sudden death of his wife in a horrendous car accident. The two become friends and then lovers, being touched along the way by Langley's late wife's gay friends, a Tanzanian man who cares for endangered animals, and Sela's grandmother, who raises the only blue rose in the world. As Sela's stories about an aging actor named William Hathaway and a girl named Angela Star-who may or may not be real-intensify, Langley begins to show signs of mental confusion and illness. The fictional Chalice River from Sela's Quantum Crossing collection becomes a real place for him-one that is lonely, dark, and frightening. When he is ultimately swept away in a deja vu car accident just yards from where his wife died, his only hope is the power of Sela's passionate tale and her invincible love.

When Serena Skye applies to work with abused and troubled horses in the round pen at an isolated Nevada guest ranch, she instantly notices that her prospective boss, Julian Rose, is drop-dead gorgeous. After he hires her, Serena begins to work her magic with the horses-all while secretly pining for Julian. But Serena has no idea that underneath the brilliance of equines runs a dangerous ground that will soon propel her on an unexpected journey through the darkness of insanity.

After just two days, Serena has already impressed Julian with her wrangling skills, saved his life, and shared a passionate kiss with him. As they cautiously begin a romantic relationship, Julian discloses that he has not seen his schizophrenic wife, Miranda, in eight years, after she was committed to a mental institution after murdering two horses and nearly killing him. Too frightened to divorce her for fear of deadly repercussions, Julian has just learned that Miranda has been released early-and is roaming the nearby desert with a gun.

In this gripping psychological drama, a young wrangler becomes unwittingly embroiled in a perilous struggle where she must devise a way to save the animals and people she loves from the madness that threatens their paradise.

Just before her sixteenth birthday, missionary Reena Pavane stepped onto African soil and called it home. Four years later, she's swept from her post in Huzuni amid rumblings of war by British photojournalist Jim Stone, a man who loves East Africa and wants to tell its story and show its many faces. Staying true to their separate callings is complicated by their unexpected feelings for each other.

When Stone leaves hurriedly for a top-secret story but doesn't have his malaria medicine, Reena enlists the help of black man Dakimu Reiman to help her find Stone. Deep in the jungle, they discover Stone is being held by militants, and death for all seems inevitable.

The lives of Stone, Reena, and Dak evolve in the political turmoil of the 1950s and early 1960s in Tanganyika. Their personal goals, unrelated at the start, become increasingly dependent on and resolvable only inside their surprising and complex relationship. From the wild savannahs and forests of East Africa to England and the United States, spiritual, racial, and cultural barriers threaten and divide them. There is one thing among them that cannot be shaken and brings them to the harrowing edge of every choice they have made and every tenet they have believed. Their road to redemption is marked with controversy, self-doubt, and pain.

When Serena Skye applies to work with abused and troubled horses in the round pen at an isolated Nevada guest ranch, she instantly notices that her prospective boss, Julian Rose, is drop-dead gorgeous. After he hires her, Serena begins to work her magic with the horses-all while secretly pining for Julian. But Serena has no idea that underneath the brilliance of equines runs a dangerous ground that will soon propel her on an unexpected journey through the darkness of insanity.

After just two days, Serena has already impressed Julian with her wrangling skills, saved his life, and shared a passionate kiss with him. As they cautiously begin a romantic relationship, Julian discloses that he has not seen his schizophrenic wife, Miranda, in eight years, after she was committed to a mental institution after murdering two horses and nearly killing him. Too frightened to divorce her for fear of deadly repercussions, Julian has just learned that Miranda has been released early-and is roaming the nearby desert with a gun.

In this gripping psychological drama, a young wrangler becomes unwittingly embroiled in a perilous struggle where she must devise a way to save the animals and people she loves from the madness that threatens their paradise.

After admiring UCLA's popular English professor and poet, Dr. William Langley for eleven years, twenty-seven-year-old graduate student Sela Hart is finally accepted into one of his exclusive creative writing classes. She has had her own work published and studied in Africa, and he has had a stressful twenty-year marriage to a lesbian woman while struggling to balance his world with the demands of academia. But the forty-year-old Langley is intrigued by Sela's strange stories, while she is drawn to his emotional reeling at the sudden death of his wife in a horrendous car accident. The two become friends and then lovers, being touched along the way by Langley's late wife's gay friends, a Tanzanian man who cares for endangered animals, and Sela's grandmother, who raises the only blue rose in the world. As Sela's stories about an aging actor named William Hathaway and a girl named Angela Star-who may or may not be real-intensify, Langley begins to show signs of mental confusion and illness. The fictional Chalice River from Sela's Quantum Crossing collection becomes a real place for him-one that is lonely, dark, and frightening. When he is ultimately swept away in a deja vu car accident just yards from where his wife died, his only hope is the power of Sela's passionate tale and her invincible love.

Just before her sixteenth birthday, missionary Reena Pavane stepped onto African soil and called it home. Four years later, she's swept from her post in Huzuni amid rumblings of war by British photojournalist Jim Stone, a man who loves East Africa and wants to tell its story and show its many faces. Staying true to their separate callings is complicated by their unexpected feelings for each other.

When Stone leaves hurriedly for a top-secret story but doesn't have his malaria medicine, Reena enlists the help of black man Dakimu Reiman to help her find Stone. Deep in the jungle, they discover Stone is being held by militants, and death for all seems inevitable.

The lives of Stone, Reena, and Dak evolve in the political turmoil of the 1950s and early 1960s in Tanganyika. Their personal goals, unrelated at the start, become increasingly dependent on and resolvable only inside their surprising and complex relationship. From the wild savannahs and forests of East Africa to England and the United States, spiritual, racial, and cultural barriers threaten and divide them. There is one thing among them that cannot be shaken and brings them to the harrowing edge of every choice they have made and every tenet they have believed. Their road to redemption is marked with controversy, self-doubt, and pain.