Bøger af Linda Joyce Ott

Clutter and hoarding, creativity and the artist, and death and dying come together in this dystopian novel. Before you die, you must divest yourself of all your worldly goods. That is The Naked Law of a new world order. But if you keep telling stories, or if you keep making art, you may just delay the Final Reckoning. "The Naked Law" opens with the launch of a blog that shares stories about life after The Final Catastrophe. You will hear from a chorus of voices including Sheri, a collector who is preparing for her day in court to argue against the Essential Goods Inventory form; Laszlo the Fixer, an old-world rebel who helped rebuild society after The Great Resolve; and Amy Anderson, author of the Clutter-Buster's blog. You will also encounter Lena Lorca, an artist struggling with creativity and death in a brave new world.

Themes of fractured dreams, poignant memories, and loneliness unite the fourteen short stories in "Open Wounds, Secret Obsessions". In this debut collection, you'll meet a variety of eccentric characters including a young traveller who is duped by a charismatic thief in Rome, a woman who obsessively attends strangers' weddings, a son who gets to really know his father only after he has died, and a woman whose mother's puzzling disappearance has tainted her life. In each of the stories, a deceptively smooth surface cracks open to reveal ogres and monsters below. The characters mysteriously pass from normalcy into serious obsession, if not madness, with the reader never quite able to say when this happens. The stories show young people providing perceptive insight far beyond their years, while older ones often appear naïve. Many of the characters are broken, badly hurt by life and by the passage of time. The author's special talent for writing instinctively with enormous gut-feeling gives these poignant stories their amazing power. Her refined sense of understatement, direct style, and a keen eye for the telling detail combine to reveal complete worlds of inner turmoil. Vivid descriptions reveal a writer who is observant, savvy, and possesses a wicked sense of humour. The author tells a good story with dazzling simplicity and the reader will delight in discovering this unique voice in these emotionally intense stories.