Where Time Begins: A Novel
(Paperback)
Publishing Details
Where Time Begins: A Novel
By (Author) Sasha Paulsen
She Writes Press
She Writes Press
18th August 2022
United States
Classifications
General
Fiction
813.6
Physical Properties
Paperback
368
Width 139mm, Height 215mm
Description
Shelley Ilillouette attempts to escape her disastrous life in San Francisco, only to fall into a comically bewildering world of mystery, adventure, and romance in the South Pacific Kingdom of Tonga.
Its 1976, and Shelley Ilillouette, unemployed and without prospects, has never heard of the Kingdom of Tonga but when an artist offers her a job in this South Pacific kingdom, she takes it.
She arrives in Tonga to discover that her employer has vanished. Alone in a bewildering world where ancient Polynesia mingles with missionaries, Peace Corps, and yacht dwellers, she is adopted by Foeata, a genial Tongan who decides that a mafu a sweetheart will solve Shelleys problems. Foeata favors the Peace Corps doctor, Skip, but he is smitten with Lily, a mysterious half-Tongan actress. Then Shelleys first and only lover, Jackson, follows her to the islands, and life only get more complicated.
When Lily goes missing, too, and Jacksons visit proves disastrous, Shelley has to admit that she has not escaped from anything; she has just brought all the confusion of life with her.
Why, Foeata wonders, are Americans so bad at love
Amidst encounters with sharks and one octopus (meetings far less harrowing than those she has with missionaries and ex-lovers over the course of her adventure), Shelley untangles a web of stories reaching back decades, leading her to conclude that Tonga may indeed be what its king has proclaimed: the place where time begins.
Reviews
Against a setting of hibiscus blooms and feathery palms, Shelley stumbles into mystery and love in a fast-paced, delightful journey written with a sure hand and abundant imagination.
Kathleen Reynolds, author of The Book Beat for the Napa Valley Register
Sasha Paulsen is a conjuror of magical places and memorable characters.
Georgeanne Brennan, author A Pig in Provence
Author Bio
Sasha Paulsen lives in Napa Valley, California, where she has written about food, wine, art, and travel for two decades. A graduate of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, she published her first novel, Dancing on the Spiders Web, in 2019. Her love of travel has taken her across through Europe, across Russia, Mongolia and China, into the mountains of Tibet and Nepal, and to the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific.
