Bücher veröffentlicht von Art of Storytelling

Winner of the 2018 Independent Publisher Award, Gold Medal for Visionary Fiction.¿Twenty-something Pearl Swinton is on walkabout for a year across Southeast Asia with her boyfriend, Finn. Pearl is a travel writer and encounters a host of dynamic characters, from a boat boy in the Philippines, to a penitent in Nepal, to a rickshaw driver in India, each challenging her world view. In search of her life purpose, Pearl is being pulled more deeply away from all that is familiar on this journey, a path that began when she moved to Tokyo from the U.S. years earlier. Who is the self behind cultural conditioning? Who is she when no one is telling her who to be? What is her calling? The couple ends up in London, where Pearl finds some semblance of home, while Finn struggles to belong in a place he left behind years before. Pearl ultimately realizes that before she can go upward and understand this illusory "purpose", she must journey down into the self and heal. In the end, she is faced with a decision that could reduce to ashes the life she has built, and destroy all that she holds dear.

Winner of the Silver Medal for Visionary Fiction in the 2015 Independent Publishers Awards.Turbulence opens this second book in the Elemental Journey Series as Pearl Swinton, now in her twenties, uproots from the Midwest and flies to Tokyo, where she has no job, no friends, and no home, a place where she hopes to live floating above the culture. How will she survive with her mystical visions in a country so foreign from everything she knows? Pearl lands at a Jesuit mission and is magnetized to the ethereal missionary Usui. After she is forced to leave, she is thrown unprepared into the complicated world of Japanese culture and must learn to maneuver friendships, understand love, and balance the intensity of working at one of the city's largest newspapers. When she stumbles upon Usui living as a homeless man, a journey begins that draws Pearl deep into Japan's hidden homeless underworld. Having given up any connection to civilization to "find himself," Usui brings Pearl face to face with her own homelessness and challenges her to begin the painful journey of understanding her visions and finding herself. In the end, hope flies on the paper wings of thousands of origami cranes. Pearl is called to her own mysticism, not just for herself, but for a world where the loss of magic may well be the real threat. A fundamentally radical work of art, Air tackles core issues facing individuals coming of age in today's world. How can anyone feel safe and at home on a planet threatened by escalating violence and devastating climate change? Where, truly, is home?

Winner of the 2015 Independent Publishers' Gold Medal for Best Midwest Fiction. In rural Missouri in the 1970s, thirteen-year-old Pearl Swinton has just had her first mystical vision. There is no place for Pearl's "gift" in the bloody reality of subsistence farming and rural poverty. As her visions unfold, she must find her way in a family and a community that react with fear and violence. When Pearl discovers that her Aunt Nadine has a similar gift, she bicycles across the state to find her. That trip unexpectedly throws Pearl into a journey to save her runaway sister and sends her into a deep exploration of herself, her visions, and her visceral relationship to the earth. Told with fierce lyricism, Earth is a story about the importance of finding one's own truth and sense of self in dire circumstances and against the odds. It is also a story about the link between understanding ourselves and our relationship with the earth. In this first of the five-book Elemental Journey Series that will follow Pearl across continents and into adulthood, Caroline Allen introduces a form of storytelling that is unflinching in its honesty, filled with compassion, and underscored with originality. Includes a thought-provoking Book Group Guide.