This a love story about two people who each has a mixture of advantages and disadvantages. The pair are immediately attracted to one another, but whereas Tom, who is disabled but immensely privileged, emotionally immature and lonely, is infatuated, Abigail does not want to be absorbed into the devoted team of carers who enable Tom to be high-functioning. She is more emotionally mature that Tom, and wants them to be lovers on an equal basis.
Abigail runs a small NGO which collects donations to help the people of Palestine. Tom, having survived an assassination attempt and a long period of rehabilitation, is working for an international NGO that delivers humanitarian aid to disaster areas. They are thrown together when one of Abigail’s volunteers, a young Jewish man, Simon, volunteers to act as a crew member on one of Tom’s convoys to Gaza. The convoy is ambushed and Simon is kidnapped by an extremist Islamic terrorist group.
Tom and Abigail are both advantaged and disadvantaged in comparison to one another. If they are ever to become each other’s equal, then each of them will have to grow and change in different ways. The book ends as, having successfully rescued Simon, they embark on that journey.
I wrote this book because I wanted to explore a number of themes – equality, conflict. disability, ability, feminism, masculinity – and the different ways they manifest themselves. As a disabled woman who ran an award-winning NGO focussed on the conflict in Northern Ireland, these are issues I understand. I deliberately fictionalised the Arab/Israeli conflict and set the novel before the first Intifada to distance it from present reality. I began writing it before the horrible attack on Israel by Hamas and its truly horrendous aftermath.
If you like the sound of the book, and are an agent or a publisher. please get in touch with me via my contact page. (Please note: I am not interested in self-publishing.)
If you just like the sound of it, and would like to know if it gets published, you can do the same, and I will let you know if it succeeds.