Bøger af Douglas Armstrong

The murder of a newspaper reporter during a 1967 riot pulls two of his colleagues deep into the contentious issues of race in America and into the secrets of a troubled inner city family. Did a nine-year-old boy pull the trigger? Alternately solemn and irreverent, Douglas Armstrong's Color of The Sun looks back at an era when the civil rights movement rocked the social underpinnings of a nation, including old-boy, newspaper journalism. Gabe Harden and Scott Patterson return in the second of Armstrong's Life on The Sun series.

Life on The Sun spans ten days of anger and confusion in a bygone era of love beads, tear gas, and manual typewriters. It's July 1967, and war is raging in Vietnam. Following a suspicious fire that has killed a famous war protester, three headstrong strangers-a rookie newspaper reporter, a veteran rewrite man, and the anti-war fugitive's bereaved girlfriend-clash as the mystery of his murder unfolds in their revolving viewpoints. This sometimes darkly comic novel, set against the eccentric inner workings of a metropolitan daily newspaper, is a remembrance of tumultuous times when lives were disrupted or destroyed by war's far-reaching consequences.

Emma Starkey is a spunky little girl trying hard to be charitable and virtuous. But her calculated attempts have a way of backfiring with tumultuous consequences in this poignant story of small-town life in 1920s Kansas. As Emma's cranky grandmother observes, "Even sunflowers cast shadows." Weaving through four years of Emma's engaging disasters is her chaotic friendship with a transplanted Yankee whiz kid, Margaret Drummond, whose family arrives one summer burdened with a heavy secret and a flair for the dramatic. Emma's and Margaret's brothers and sisters become friends, too, but their screwball pursuits and youthful infatuations spawn rivalries that threaten to split them apart. Perilous--even tragic--turns await, along with powerful and unexpected lessons about friendship, jealousy, compassion, and the curious world of grown-ups. Cornucopia, Kansas, is filled with colorful crackpots, bullies, and quiet heroes. In their stories, and most especially Emma's, Even Sunflowers Cast Shadows recaptures a faded moment when innocence could still be lost grudgingly.