Before
she dies Kitty Stevenson needs to tell her story of death and
depravity in pre-war Nazi Germany.
An
18 year old Kitty finds herself in Nazi Germany. She is there to
spend a family fortune that’s been embargoed by the Nazis. She
leads the high life while all around her Jews are being arrested and
war is imminent. She risks her life to let the world know about the
oncoming Holocaust. She helps Jews escape and runs for her life
aboard a Jewish refugee boat bound for Palestine. When war doesn’t
break out immediately, she returns to Germany and quickly books a
passage home on a German registered ship with the little money she
has left. She arrives in New York City just three days before Hitler
invades Poland igniting the Second World War.
Set
in 1997, my novel OLD MONEY takes place in a hardscrabble, rural Nova
Scotia, reminiscent of Annie Proulx’s “The Shipping News,” and
in pre-WWII France and Germany.
OLD
MONEY is the story of three women:
Kitty
Stevenson
is a dying New York socialite, expatriated to rural Nova Scotia. She
has a major heart attack during an extreme ice storm. Confronting
death, she recounts her life to Barb,
her rustic neighbor: an austere childhood in a French convent school,
the high life in pre-war Nazi Germany (“I was Sally Bowles only I
had money”), meeting Hitler on the eve of Kristallnacht,
and a desperate effort to help herself and others escape the coming
war in Europe. Meanwhile, Mandy
Betts,
a Pentecostal
preacher, is bent on a last minute conversion of an agnostic Kitty.
Mandy's persistence and antics offset an otherwise dark narrative.
The only question is, will Kitty finish her story before she dies?
I
would compare the tone of the story to Annie Piroux’s The
Shipping News,
with a dash of Philip Kerr’s Berlin
Noir
thrown in. The manuscript has been edited for colloquial voice by the
editor of the Pictou Advocate (Nova Scotia) and for story integrity
at the Fresh Pond Writers Workshop.
I
have been a general assignment reporter. I wrote four trade textbooks
(computer science) for a major publisher. My magazine credits include
monthly columns Panic,
in Altos
World,
and Famous
Last Words in
Unix
World magazine.
I have multiple stories on Medium.com, and Ibbetson Street Magazine.
I have edited/curated the Wilderness House Literary Review for the
past ten years.
The
manuscript is complete at ~85,000 words.
