in the works…

The Lone Sparrow

The Lone Sparrow is a cold-war era drama about an exiled, and then imprisoned, journalist’s fight for human rights and freedom of speech against the backdrop of Czechoslovakia’s struggle for independence during the tumultuous decade of the 1970s.

Tatiana Hrda, stranded in London by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, works at the BBC World Service.  Two years after starting at the BBC, Tatiana survives a hit-and-run ordered by the KGB. Reeling from the near-death experience, she makes a dubious decision to marry Salem Gott, an American businessman who, unbeknownst to her, buys guns from Czech communists.

In January 1977, the manifesto Charter 77, which demanded free speech and basic human rights, is published in Prague. Tatiana, who by then is divorced and heart broken, takes on a risky assignment from her new employer, The Washington Post, and goes back to her homeland. She is arrested and put into the infamous Pankrac prison in Prague, where her survival is in doubt.

Left without options, Tatiana’s best chance for freedom may depend on Cassandra Milna, a woman who was responsible for the breakdown of Tatiana’s marriage. But Casandra lives by her own rules and her views of personal freedom is as expansive as her view of marital fidelity.   

When Cassandra comes into possession of secrets going back to World War II, she decides to take action, setting in motion a chain of events that indelibly marks both women.

The Lone Sparrow is a romance fiction influenced by first-hand accounts and recollections of the Cold War; it also foreshadows present events in Ukraine. In addition to dramatizing the human impact on lives lived on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the novel exposes the deeply held misogyny typical of communist leadership even as it preached female emancipation. 

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