White Vespa

Anne shook herself then poured a little water from a plastic bottle onto her fingers and slapped it on her cheeks. "Wake up!" A few heads turned toward her and she walked stiffly over to the rail. She'd been sitting alone on a bench on the shady side of the boat for an hour, but no one had approached her, and no one approached her as she stood shading her eyes, looking down at the glassy water. She didn't mind. She preferred to be left alone. Kevin Oderman's second novel presents readers with a character of complexity and depth. Myles Toomey is an American ex-patriot who hopes to quell his grief for a long lost son in the stillness of his photographs of the Dodecanese Islands. But friendship and then love for a woman wounded in her own family-born grief propels him toward life again, where stillness is set into motion and identity might be recovered, against odds, in a foreign place. Out of his travel experiences Kevin Odermanwrote his first novel, Going, and currently his literary nonfiction about travel is being gathered into a volume, Cannot Stay. Twice he has lived abroad as a Fulbright Fellow and has taught modern American poetry as a senior lecturer at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece, and at Punjab University in Lahore, Pakistan. He is a professor of English at West Virginia University.