Dreams of Drowning by Patricia Averbach

Board a ship that travels between real time where lives are buffeted by political conflict, tragedy and loss and another mysterious time where pain is healed, and love is eternal.

Dreams of Drowning

by Patricia Averbach

Genre: Literary Fiction, Magical Realism

Dreams of Drowning is a work of magical realism that moves between real time where lives are buffeted by political conflict, tragedy and loss and another mysterious time where pain is healed, and love is eternal.

It’s 1973 and Amy, an American ex-pat, is living as an illegal immigrant in Toronto where she’s fled to escape the scandal surrounding her twin sister’s death by drowning. Joanie’s been gone two years, but Amy still hears her cries for help. Romance would jeopardize the secrets Amy has to keep, but when she meets Arcus, a graduate student working to restore democracy in Greece, she falls hard. Arcus doesn’t know about Amy’s past, and she doesn’t know Arcus has secrets of his own, including the shady history of an ancient relic he uses as a paperweight.

In 1993 Toronto, Jacob Kanter, a retired archaeologist, is mourning his dear wife and grappling with his son’s plans to move him to a nursing home. Despite double vision, tremors, and cognitive impairment, he remembers sailing as a youth and sets out toward the lake where he boards a ferry boat embarking on its maiden voyage. He expects a short harbor cruise, but the Aqua Meridian is larger than it looks, and time is slippery on the water. When he hears a drowning woman call for help his story merges with Amy’s, and they discover they have unexpected gifts for one another.

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Patricia Averbach began her writing career at sixteen as the entirely unqualified literary assistant to Anzia Yeszierska, Jewish-American author of the immigrant experience. A native Clevelander, she’s a former director of The Chautauqua Writers Center in Chautauqua, New York. Her upcoming novel, Dreams of Drowning (Bedazzled Ink, 2024), was a finalist for the Tucson Festival of Books and Chanticleer’s Somerset Award for Literary Fiction. Previous novels include Painting Bridges (Bottom Dog Press, 2013) and Resurrecting Rain (Golden Antelope Press, 2020.) Her poetry chapbook, Missing Persons, (Ward Wood Publishing, 2013) was cited by Times of London Literary Supplement (November 2014) as one of the best small collections of the year. She lives with her husband in a suburb of Cleveland when she’s not visiting her daughters in Toronto, Maui and Peru or hanging out in a virtual world called Second Life. To learn more go to http://www.patriciaaverbach.com.

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