The follow-up to the award-winning Crystal Ships, Wandering Barques traces the legacy of the traumatic '60s well into the '70s and '80s.
Twin sisters, just toddlers when their father dies in the Vietnam War, are coming of age in the mid-seventies. They each attempt to compensate for his loss in their own way, and their styles of coping could not be more different. The first strives to forget the past and live in the present, while the second seeks to understand those earlier years and obsesses about the loss of her uncle's girlfriend, a dancer who was tragically killed ten years earlier.
The story follows the pair's lives over the next decade-with one winding up pregnant and married and the other fleeing to Africa to live with her uncle's family and escape the temptation of forbidden love.
Readers will become immersed in the social and political issues that defined the era, from the AIDS epidemic to the Cold War. Still, Wandering Barques is primarily a tale of resilience, told with both sensitivity and the indomitable humor fundamental to the American spirit.
About the Author: Richard Sharp graduated with a BA from Harvard and earned his MPIA from Princeton. He went on to enjoy a successful career as an international development consultant before retiring to pursue his literary endeavors.
Sharp is also the author of Crystal Ships, Jacob's Cellar, Time is the Oven, and the Independent Publishers gold medal winner The Duke Don't Dance. In addition to winning the IPPY, The Duke Don't Dance was included on the Kirkus Best Self-Published Book list, won the Best Adult Fiction E-Book award, and was a ForeWord Clarion Firsts and Reader's Favorite finalist. An extract from Crystal Ships was a Deane Ritch Lomax Poetry Award honorable mention.
Sharp is married with two adult children and lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.
