Desert Hawk Books

 

The Last Paradise
A Novel

James D. Houston

 

384  pages
5.5" x 8.5"
Hardcover

Quantity:  $22.95 & S/H  

 

In The Last Paradise, James D. Houston transforms a classic genre-the detective story-into a masterful narrative of a quest for spiritual and cultural value.
    The time is 1986. Travis Doyle, a restless Vietnam veteran now working as an insurance claims adjuster in the Bay Area, is dispatched to Hawaii to investigate fire damage at a geothermal drilling site located in volcanic lava fields. The last thing he expects is to confront the mystery of an ancient spirituality and an indigenous world view that tests and challenges his own. On the Big Island he encounters a former lover, Evangeline Sakai, a mixed-blood woman who, after many years away, has returned hoping to reconnect with her ancestral past. She becomes Travis's guide through a realm of nature signs and uncanny coincidences. With her he comes to know a world in which two opposing views are in conflict: Earth as commodity (whose resources exist to be consumer) and Earth as ancestor (to be honored and revered).
     The Last Paradise begins in San Francisco and pushes farther west, past the continent's edge, out into the Pacific. While its environmental drama is as contemporary as today's headlines, the novel resonates with the ancient theme of quest and transformation. A compelling cross-cultural love story, it is also a lyrical meditation on the volcano. Said to be the home of Pele, the fire goddess, Hawai'i's volcano region is at once destructive and creative, deadly and healing. Its capacity to transform human lives is at the heart of this powerful tale of crisis and renewal.

"The Last Paradise is a fine read, enwording what I've been suspecting about this planet and our lives on it, with a love story that is full-blown and large and emotionally true. The love between Angel and Travis connects them to each other and connects the ancestors and relatives and nations, and all is connected to the living Pele earth. James Houston is a most valuable natural resource. Our world needs his way of seeing and knowing."-Maxine Hong Kingston, author of China Men and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.

"In The Last Paradise, James D. Houston takes up yet again the most ancient theme of quest and transformation. Houston certainly seems to know and cherish Hawaiian history, culture, and lore. The novel is beautifully (and I would even say lovingly) written. Houston is a superb storyteller. To my knowledge, there is no other look like this."-Al Young, author of Seduction by Light and Drowning in the Sea of Love: Essays on Music.

"The Last Paradise is another brilliant novel by one of the best writers in America. No one writes of humans' bonds with the earth they know and the people they love as finely as does Jim Houston. In prose both sparse and beautifully controlled, The Last Paradise tells a crucial story for the end of an extraordinarily destructive century and offers wisdom for the new one before us. I read the first paragraph and thought at once, 'I wish I'd written that.'"-Louis Owens, author of The Sharpest Sight and Other Destinies.

James D. Houston is the author of six novels, including Gig, Love Life, and Continental Drift, and several non-fiction works. He has been a visiting professor in California, Oregon, Michigan, and Hawaii. His works have earned numerous honors, among them a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, an NEA Writing Grant, the Humanitas Prize, and a 1995 Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy. He lives and writes in Santa Cruz, California.