We are trying something special on the 23rd of June. I’ve written an apocryphal quartet named “Sanctuary.” The four books are in varying states of completion but the first is due to be published on the 23rd of June, my daughter’s birthday. To celebrate its publication we’re making a video of me as Otto Baumgartner reading chapter 1 of Sanctuary I: The First Secular Diaspora and posting it on Thursday (6/24/2021) on YouTube. When the video is ready I’ll post a blog with the YouTube URL here, along with the chapter title and the first paragraph of the chapter. We plan to create and post a new blog for each chapter every Monday and Thursday until we run out of chapters.

Sanctuary I: The First Secular Diaspora is a historical novel set 200 years in the future, looking back on the world we live in today.  The narrator is Otto Baumgartner whose ancestors escaped from East Germany during the Cold War and subsequently emigrated to Hood River, Oregon, when they were doggedly pursued by the Stasi.  Sanctuary I is the first novel in the trilogy.  The story Otto tells is of an underground city in the Bob Marshall Wilderness named Sanctuary, built by a cadre of the uber rich to ward off the imminent threat of nuclear winter posed by the Cold War, followed by the existential threat of Climate Change and finally to provide for the very survival of the species in the wake of a worldwide pandemic.

If you’d like to become acquainted with the main characters in the Sanctuary Trilogy in advance, you can get a copy of the prequel, Hood River Anthology (see the Books tab of this website) and read along. I hope you enjoy it and I hope you tell all your friends.