Memoir and Novel

I’m currently marketing two books independently: Passage From England, a memoir; and High Pocket, a novel. The memoir is available in paperback and on Kindle from Amazon, and in other electronic formats. Click the memoir icon below for an excerpt and reader reviews. High Pocket is available for free download by clicking its icon below.

I’m in the process of getting my new novel, In the Shade of the Freeway, out into the world via traditional approaches to publication. I welcome interest from agents, editors, and publishers. You can contact me directly at frankjz@mysocalledparadise.com.

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Passage From England, a memoir: A lifetime of plans and dreams are packed into a container and shipped from Los Angeles to a Caribbean island; but for a writer and immigrant from post-WWII Europe and for his wife whose difficult childhood has left its own scars, the past is hard to leave behind and even harder to forget.

An emotional journey of a husband and wife’s search for home that interweaves reflections of a tumultuous childhood in America’s 50s and 60s with the adventures of the couple’s early retirement in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The journey for the man begins as a boy in 1956, crossing the Atlantic by ocean liner, arriving in New York Harbor, then traveling by train to the paper-thin suburbs of Tarzana, California. Peddling as fast as he can to keep up with the neighborhood kids and culture of Boomer America, the child struggles against his father’s violent alcoholism, determined to find a way to belong in a world where the tanned, carefree girls from the affluent foothills seem just out of reach in the rock ‘n roll moonlight of adolescence. Told from two points of view spanning five decades, the multiple journeys of the child and the husband and wife on a tropical isle enrich one another, providing an understanding of the demons that pursued them both while uncovering the spirit of endurance that was fostered within them.

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High Pocket, a novel: A modern-day gold miner risks everything in an attempt to retrieve a fortune in gold from an abandoned cavern two miles deep inside the largest active gold mine in the United States, the Homestake Gold Mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

The Homestake Mine is both the lifeblood and destroyer of the small town of Lead, a place where dreams turn to nightmares as suddenly as the tunnels collapse. For Jake, a young miner working the most lucrative and treacherous job inside the mine, the odds are getting worse with each contract that drags him deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast.

His world suddenly becomes much more dangerous when he falls in love with Mary Stennis. She’s the daughter of a crippled miner, named Sandy, who doesn’t want his daughter marrying a worthless pit dog like himself. But Jake is persistent; and when Sandy tells him the unbelievable story of a cavern of gold-lined cavern he discovered in the accident that nearly took his life, Jake knows it’s the kind of crucible he must endure not only to win Mary, but to win back his own sense of dignity. He also knows that such a tale of gold can’t be anything more than the wild ravings of a bitter man who wants revenge against the mine that crippled him.