fiction, literary

Orwell Hughes - 20 years old, active in sports, arts, and church - enjoys life as a young man coming of age in 1974's Lusaka, where his father (James "Bwana" Hughes is a Canadian diplomat and Orwell attends the University of Zambia. Orwell endears himself to African peers Benjamin Mudenda, Winter Banda, and Cepheus Belo, through interests in African languages, history, justice, and aspirations. Yet, he suffers racism, and awkward social relationships with young women that his father and older brother Richard can't help him solve.
Orwell invites Tracy MacDonachie, his former Sunday school teacher and youth leader - who encouraged him as an impressionable lad back home in Canada - to visit him in Zambia, hoping that this older, successful and wiser man can continue to mentor him. Orwell's sisters Suzanne and Janice Joanne invite Tracy's sisters Kathleen and Alicia to visit. The MacDonachies arrive for Easter but stay longer than planned, and are not as remembered; Tracy woos Orwell's "coloured" girlfriend Georgina. Several other Canadians join Bwana Hughes's team, including Karla Bryant, a troubled and withdrawn young lady whom Orwell agrees to tutor in English while the university has been closed by a workers' strike. His hopes revive when he joins Tracy's boxing clinic, after MacDonachie's unheralded protege, Karl Thompson, does well against a superior African heavy-weight champion.
Read about this celebration of unlikely friendships built across racial, cultural, and religious barriers in southern Africa, during difficult times when Zambia is emerging as a dynamic new nation, while European colonialism and South African apartheid are fading away.

I hope that "Seen in a Mirror Dimly" will be the first novel in my planned "Come By Here, My Lord" trilogy, with "Be Careful What You Ask for", and "A Dangerous Journey", to follow, being published by FriesenPress Inc. within the next five years.