i write poterie with my pencil and my paper 'and my heart and soul' ~Suicide Queen

At eighteen, Jade Sampson thought she had found the one man she would spend the rest of her life with, Austin Giles. He had been a long time childhood friend and later became her high school sweetheart. He was perfect in every way... or that's what she once thought. It was your typical hot southern, summer afternoon when she made the dreadful mistake of walking in on him with another woman in a rather compromising position. In a matter of minutes, her easy-going, perfect world came crashing down like a ton of bricks. Utterly heart broken and destroyed, Jade made the decision to leave her small home town and make her own way. It wasn't until five years later she received a call that would turn her new life upside down again. Her father, the same father that turned his back on her all those years ago had passed away. Now that she is forced to go back home and settle his affairs, how will she handle seeing Austin once again? Can she protect her heart any better this go round or will she relive the same mistakes and lose it all again.

The setting for "Men of Winter" is deliberately vague but seems to be Russia, especially Siberia, in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. The protagonist, Hektr Pastrovich, is a journalist and poet who travels to the front of a war his beleaguered country has been fighting for nine years. He's searching for information about a mysterious vagabond who calls himself the "Prince of Ithaka" and along the way he meets a beautiful and charismatic woman. The novel is a sort of sequel to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Visit tedmorrissey.com.