Gunnar Brume, a thirty-six year old
adjunct professor of Late Modern History, lives a pleasantly mundane, albeit
somewhat lonely existence in a city on the US East Coast, where he teaches a
course on WWII at a local University.
One summer afternoon, while watching the Euro Cup Final – a favorite
pastime – an unexpected phone call abruptly upends his peaceful, solitary life,
propelling Gunnar on a wild-goose chase to Berlin, Germany and onward to the
Hawaiian Islands. Beguiled by Blue Paw,
a young Burmese orphan with a distinct lunar personality, Gunnar travels deep
into his own past, and the pasts of others, to learn the meaning of a certain
illusory melody – a melody that holds the secret to a bond forged in blood on
the day before Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Soviet Russia.
Hard-boiled, but with a magical
twist, Moon River is the story of
Blue Paw, an orphaned Burmese girl, whose preternatural ties to a young German
soldier transcend the boundaries of time and the borders of countries. Moon
River seamlessly merges three distinct narratives: a crime story involving
a Russian Crime Syndicate and its fiendishly sophisticated exploitation of
teenage girls, a war story that follows a forlorn German soldier haunted by the
accidental killing of a female Russian counterpart, and finally, Blue Paw’s
physical and metaphysical search for love and redemption that ties the three
narratives together.
Moon River is a multi-layered
exploration of love, war, and crime that will take the reader from the slums of
Berlin to the wealthiest enclaves of Hawaii, from the jungles of Burma to the
battlefields of Stalingrad, from ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ to a burial at
sea. None of it may seem possible, and
yet, when four people meet, driven by impulse, guilt and desire, strange things
will happen.
