Bøger af Tom Maremaa

In a military hospital for wounded veterans of the Iraq war, ex-Marine Jeremy Witherspoon, called Spoon by his comrades, is trying to come to terms with his life-changing injuries. The hospital specializes in treating "metal heads," those with severe head trauma whose injuries require the insertion of a metal plate. Spoon passes the long hours in bed trading war stories with his fellow patients and recounts his complicity as a witness to a brutal crime of war in Ramadi, and his coercion in a cover-up when threatened by a private contractor who goes by the nickname Skank. When the wounded Skank appears at the hospital, he bluntly threatens Spoon to keep his mouth shut about Ramadi. One by one, Spoon's friends on the ward begin dying in mysterious ways, and he knows he must defeat Skank or die himself. This powerful, heartbreaking novel about the aftermath of war creates a vivid world populated by odd characters who struggle with being outcasts and victims. The young narrator mingles his quirky slang about the war with eloquent and often lyrical emotion.Editorial ReviewsFrom Booklist*Starred Review* The most tragic and enduring legacy of the Iraq War may be the thousands of vets suffering traumatic brain injury (TBI). Metal Heads is a moving and deeply unsettling novel of a hospital full of such vets in California. The book's narrator, Marine Lance Corporal Jeremy "Spoon" Witherspoon, is typical: he's lost an eye and a hand and has a steel plate in his head. He's dosed with an ever-changing cocktail of drugs and may or may not have a steady grasp of reality. He describes a hospital surrounded by razor wire, filled with video-surveillance cameras, and policed by private contractors. Few of the patients have any family, loved ones, or even visitors. Spoon hints that patients are being experimented on and believes they'll soon be coming for him. At the same time, he fears the hospital will be closed for lack of funds, and he will be homeless. When he and fellow patients ask when they will be released, they are told, "Don't even think about it," which they translate into the word unthinkable, which, in turn, becomes their ironic mantra, the Catch-22 for a new generation of warriors. The heart of this dark, Kafkaesque tale lies in uncertainty. TBI, like war, wreaks havoc on the brain, and Maremaa's characters may all be delusional. Or not. A powerful and heartbreaking novel. --Thomas GaughanReview"This is a heartbreaking, well-paced story of an injured Iraqi veteran and the terrors of war . . . Told in the vernacular of the narrator, complete with misspelling and lingo of street youth, the narrative tells the story of all those touched by the war . . . This moving, in your face work packs an emotional punch." -Publishers Weekly"The heart of this dark, Kafkaesque tale lies in uncertainty. TBI, like war, wreaks havoc on the brain, and Maremaa's characters may all be delusional. Or not. A powerful and heartbreaking novel." -Booklist, starred review

In assembling this collection of narrative prose, both novellas and stories from various novels, I have attempted to provide readers with a broad selection of styles and voices, as well as an extensive range of characters, situations, and geographies. My writing over the years tends to cast a wide net, and in this case, we taste the joys and sorrows of life in Paris, in 1922, the madness of Prague, 1968, when the Soviet tanks rolled in, and beyond-all landscapes that I lived in and imagined.The collection is bookmarked by two novellas, Bones of the Amazon and The Night of the Cougar, which are set in the dark corners and hidden canyons of Silicon Valley, where I have been living and working for the better part of a quarter century. The sampling of work that falls in between those bookmarks is drawn from my larger and more expansive novels, including most notably Grok and Entanglement. The unifying thread, at once thematic and structural, is the Feminine Principle, the experience of women who must overcome strange and unpredictable obstacles in life, women who, ultimately, have to confront the perils of the unknown and make strong choices to survive. The women depicted in these narratives are probably all anima types, willful and defiant, sure of themselves, warriors to the end. Here's whom we meet: Lulu Petite is a food critic for the local Palo Alto Sentinel who loves good cooking and makes a point of reviewing every restaurant in the Valley wearing a disguise to ensure she is served the same food as any of her readers would be served. As the heroine of Bones of the Amazon, she is a woman in her early forties with a lot of moxie and all the curiosity of a feral tomcat. Marie-Claire Hoffmann is a French journalist living in Prague 1968, as the city is laid to waste and ruin by the Soviet invasion, who helps finds a lost Kafka manuscript and smuggle it out to the West. Anja K. is a young gymnast and acrobat who comes to America from Prague, and finds herself confronting dark forces that threaten to take over her life.Anna Becker is a young woman coming to Paris in 1922 to study piano, who meets and has an affair with James Joyce (among many affairs) and is inspired by Gertrude Stein and Marsa, a Maltese woman, as she changes her identity from Anna to Andie to Zandie.Melissa Eddington is a photojournalist from Cambridge, England, brave and somewhat arrogant who falls in love with Zandie's son, Grok, when they each visit the gravesite of James Joyce in Zurich.Megan Wynn is a tree hugger who meets a homeless man named Scully, who is one hundred years old and who takes her on a quest to find Methuselah, the oldest living tree on the planet.Xuan Chen is a Professor of Computer Science from Beijing University, who plots her daring escape from the clutches of the master spy and Illuminati disciple, Richard Maltby.Lisa Ross-Dougherty is the inheritor of all things rich and beautiful, living on a vast estate in the canyons of Silicon Valley who meets up with Clay Swann, a man of questionable character who snaps one night and commits some horrible acts before a mountain lion takes revenge on his crimes.These were the most interesting choices in creating and building a story collection. Perhaps readers will prove me wrong, if they have their own favorites from the dozen or so novels I've written to date and wished that I had included those. If so, don't hesitate to let me know.

Rule of Law opens on the campus of the University of Santa Lucia, in California, as we find rocks being hurled at John P. Bokker III, a constitutional law scholar who authored the infamous legal memos justifying torture while serving in the Justice Department as deputy chief and advisor to the White House. Bokker has returned from Washington to teach law at the University. The law school faculty is adamant in upholding Bokker's tenure and right to teach. The city council of Santa Lucia, however, thinks differently, passing a resolution condemning his actions and "crimes against humanity," but the resolution has no teeth. Enter a young campus leader and pre-med student named Carlos Kennedy-Sanchez, also known as Cheetah. He is remarkably charismatic, another Che to his classmates, a man feared by the authorities because of his ability to mobilize large numbers of students and lead the protests demanding Bokker's resignation. Riots have erupted on campus. Suddenly, Cheetah disappears one night in a snatch-and-grab operation by a pair of hooded men, and is taken to a detention facility in the Mojave desert, a black site, off the gird, where ghost prisoners are subjected to torture. His interrogators want him to confess to being the mastermind of a sleeper cell and an architect of future terrorist acts.We now meet Kate Hawkins, a returning, wounded vet from Iraq, the winner of several Purple Hearts, who moves back to her hometown of Santa Lucia to take care of her ailing father. She struggles to find work, but fails in her efforts. Meanwhile, Bokker is in touch with agents from the government for whom he provided legal cover, and is encouraged to take a year or two off until things cool down and the new administration currently in Washington decides it has no stomach to prosecute him and others for violating the Geneva Conventions and authorizing enhanced methods of interrogation, as well as warrantless wiretapping, among other crimes. He is told by the Agency he must now move his family to the South African country of Zamboor-Kalahar where he can teach law and keep a low profile. In a series of dramatic and dangerous events, Kate runs afoul of the law and is offered a deal with her presiding judge to accompany Bokker and his family to Zamboor-Kalahar, and provide a shield of protection in case there are any problems. Kate needs to make money as a mercenary, a soldier of fortune, to support her father's deteriorating health condition, and agrees to the deal.Now the story shifts to the country of Zamboor-Kalahar, where we meet a fugitive, yet charitable New York financier, Toby Bloom, who has moved to the country because it has no extradition policy with the US. The scene opens at Bloom's son's bar mitzvah, with guests flown in from London, New York and Tel Aviv. Bloom lives in a sprawling compound of villas that house diplomats, businessmen, and government officials, all of whom are seeking to exploit Zamboor's rich lode of oil and mineral resources. Bloom agrees with his friends at the Agency to help set up John Bokker and his family when they arrive. One of Bloom's friends is a man named Jürgen Fassbinder, a safari guide and expedition leader, who later becomes romantically involved with Kate Hawkins. We follow Cheetah's escape from the Mojave detention facility, Bokker's exposure as a dark figure in the torture wars, Bloom's loss of his young son and plan to redeem himself and pay back his debt to society, Kate's reversal of position, and other events that lead to a chilling and ironic conclusion to the novel, which ends in the city of Rotterdam, Holland, at the Hague.

Firoozeh Azadi is the most beautiful of Persian women, aristocratic by birth, educated in the West, now on a journey home to Tehran after years of living abroad. Her parents, loving yet bound by tradition, have something unexpected planned for her upon arrival: an engagement party with a man whom she does not know, yet must marry. She is shocked, and rebels. Events overwhelm her, all of which she records and photographs with a magical camera given to her by a lesbian friend in California. Time stalls, winding back to Paris, 1954, as we meet Marie-Claire, a woman photographer originally in possession of that magical camera. A disciple of the Illuminati desperately wants the instrument, at whatever price, and the story propels forward to the revolutionary fervor of Prague, 1968. "Entanglement" takes us on a journey of a thousand places: the enclaves of Buenos Aires, the bombed-out streets of Belfast, the old city of Tallinn, the embattled mountain terrain of Afghanistan, before landing in the White Mountains of California, not far from Yosemite, on a quest to find the oldest living tree on Earth--Methuselah--one planted by ancient native tribes, descendants of the other worldly Sky People. We enter the lives of five women, each hopelessly flirting with danger, caught up in the throes of love, desperately in search of that invincible summer Camus so poetically imagined. The stakes are high; the forces of opposition powerful and deadly. Is deliverance possible? "Entanglement," Tom Maremaa's riveting, spellbinding novel, touches the depths of passion and romance, history and obsession in ways we have not seen or felt before.

Revenge is a dish best served cold and ... on ice. Preferably, spiked with a bitter taste of family betrayals, geopolitical conflicts and memories, all starting in Reykjavik, in the land of ice and volcanoes. Tom Maremaa's daring, provocative novel begins on the day President Reagan is shot when Dylan Rose, a young rebel without a cause, undergoes a major change in life. He must grow up and choose to follow the events of the Cold War, leading him in time to the Reykjavik Summit between Reagan and Gorbachev in October, 1986. As a young journalist, he comes of age, and begins a quest that takes him to all corners of the globe.History pivots on the promise of the Summit while the Cold War leaders struggle to reach an agreement on limiting their staggering and deadly arsenals of nuclear weapons, with the world teetering on the brink of Armageddon. Astonishingly, the agreement hinges on a single word. Is that even possible?But there's more to come, like Dylan's chance encounter with his former teacher of Russian from Berkeley, a woman of remarkable intellect, a brash and brilliant woman, on the eve of the Summit. And her secret fling, which he later discovers, with a chivalrous Soviet nuclear scientist whose loyalty to his Kremlin masters is destined to come under fire.That's just the beginning of this rich and engaging family chronicle, with roots in Nabokov, Pamuk and Tolstoy, as recounted by the journalist - a novel that spans more than four decades of geopolitical turmoil and strife. Reykjavik: A Novel takes us beyond the events of the Summit in Iceland, as we witness the fall of the Berlin Wall and eventual dissolution of the Soviet empire. History unravels when the Soviet Union comes apart, unleashing a fusillade of dark, violent forces. Oligarchs appear and take control. The teacher of Russian finds her life turned upside down in the years that follow, transformed forever. Intrigue and espionage play out - with devastating consequences - on the post-Cold War stage between America and the new Russian Federation.In the end, as readers, we come away from this richly detailed novel having experienced the world of love and geopolitics in ways we haven't seen or felt before.

Imagined is a heart-warming, poignant novel about the return of a man who either is or is not John Lennon, the famous Beatle whom the world thought was assassinated on a cold, dark night in December some twenty years ago. The man who wakes from a coma in his hospital bed, speaks in Liverpool dialect, and sings Beatles songs is truly an original creation. He takes on a world that wants to believe. And in less than a week takes us on a magical journey from the madness of New York City at Christmas to the hippie heart of San Francisco, and even a sudden leap from the Golden Gate Bridge. In the end, Imagined brings us the real promise of a Beatles reunion, and delivers a message of hope, love and reconciliation.