Author Khanh Ha: FLESH

Saturday, June 25, 2011

FLESH

A Vietnamese boy . . .

An alluring Chinese girl . . .

The execution ground in Hanoi at the turn of the 20th century . . .

The boy witnesses the beheading of his father and sets out to recover his head.

He vows to find an auspicious burial site to inter his father’s body and then find the traitor who sold his father to the authorities.

On this quest, the entire world will shift.

By twist and turn, he falls in love with a Chinese girl who works in an opium den in Hanoi only to find out a crushing shock that sends him spiraling downward.

His employer, the most enigmatic, most influential entrepreneur, has the answer for his problem.

When the boy faces the truth about the girl he’s madly in love with, and the employer whom he considers his surrogate father, he knows he has only one answer. . . .

From this backdrop . . .

FLESH takes you to the darkest side of life . . .

Where human relationship could take a sharp turn from killing for revenge to forgiving for the sake of humanity . . .

Where romance could bring you the bleakest love . . .

Where innocence is lost and the heart forever aching.

FLESH will be available in May 2012. Order it at Amazon.com, Black Heron Press,

and through your local book stores.

[Image: Just a teaser. The real book cover is forthcoming.]

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Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. You would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness. The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time or all of the time they could afford it; mostly on wine which they bought by the half-liter or liter. Many strangely named apéritifs were advertised, but few people could afford them except as a foundation to build their wine drunks on. The women drunkards were called poivrottes which meant female rummies.

The Café des Amateurs was the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard, that wonderful narrow crowded market street which led into the Place Contrescarpe. The squat toilets of the old apartment houses, one by the side of the stairs on each floor with two cleated cement shoe-shaped elevations on each side of the aperture so a locataire would not slip, emptied into cesspools which were emptied by pumping into horse-drawn tank wagons at night. In the summer time, with all windows open, you would hear the pumping and the odor was very strong. The tank wagons were painted brown and saffron color and in the moonlight when they worked the rue Cardinal Lemoine their wheeled, horse-drawn cylinders looked like Braque paintings. No one emptied the Café des Amateurs though, and its yellowed poster stating the terms and penalties of the law against public drunkenness was as flyblown and disregarded as its clients were constant and ill-smelling.

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife—second class—and the hotel where Verlaine had died where you had a room on the top floor where you worked.

—Ernest Hemingway (A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel)