A Time Apart: A Novel
by Brittany Batong
Time-Travel Romance
Publisher: Chances Press, LLC
Release Date: Feb 25, 2013
Heat Level: Sensual
Word Count: 105,000
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Description
A Time Apart explores the bittersweet duality of our
existence among the past and the present, through the eyes of Kara, a
twenty-something art school graduate who has resigned herself to contentment in
the routines of everyday family life as a commuting suburbanite.
An unexpected attraction to Jake, a slacker-colleague in her
office, is further complicated when a visit to a lavish old movie palace
initiates a journey into the past. Kara and Jake inexplicably find themselves
thrown into the turbulence of Los Angeles during the Great Depression,
maintaining a feigned marriage as inhabitants of a boarding house in a
forgotten community of Los Angeles called Bunker Hill. As partners in a past that
is both exciting and adversarial, Jake and Kara begin to develop very real
romantic feelings for one another, even as they are bound to identities in a
time that does not yet exist.
A Time Apart follows two people as they discover a Los
Angeles beyond their separate lives, beyond all comprehensible experience, and
beyond that which is real or imagined.
Excerpt
Preface: 2011
Sometimes I walk around downtown, imagining it not as this Los
Angeles, but as our Los Angeles. My mind strips away the high-rises and the
mirrored glass, isolating what is left of the city that we knew, surrounding it
with the familiar places we walked; supplementing the self-absorbed
professionals of the Financial District (who seem to me to talk to themselves
but really into their hands-free devices) with instead the department stores
and proprietors of “Art Lane”, defying the assumptions of the highbrow set,
making statements and movements with their thoughts and their art. What would
they think of this overly polished place their world has become?
I wander to 6th Street, seeing not the jumbled mix of cheap
eateries and plain façades, but the warm bookshops burgeoning with poetry and
compatriots; imagining the streets not with orange Metro buses and blue DASH
buses, but instead with red and yellow cars that sail past on their cable
connections, Delia reaching out to grab them, her laughter ringing in my ears.
And then I think of Jake, my mind carrying me to all the
places we walked that first day. Sometimes I retrace our steps from the Theatre
District, with its treasure trove of lavish movie palaces, to Pershing Square,
where my reverie allows me to push away the gaudy concrete and primary colors
of a park redesign gone wrong; and instead see the trees and grass of that
other Los Angeles. My eyes continue to the grand old Biltmore Hotel, still as
proud and dignified as it was and now somewhat out of place, and I smile as I
think of that first night. If only I could dream vividly enough, I could bring
to life the steep incline up Olive Street to Bunker Hill and find my way home
to our old Victorian, up the concrete steps and through the creaky porch, into
the parlor where our friends gather, spinning records on the old Victrola while
I trip on the back step as Jake tries to waltz me around the room. My heart
begins to throb in my throat and tears sting at my eyes.
But on I walk, as if it is the only way to keep those
memories real.
It is when the memories are their most vivid that I chance
upon a group of colleagues, who smile at me and say “hello”. I smile back but
resent this invasion, this reminder that the place we knew is no longer here.
That place, that life that we lived before us, before now, is gone forever. I
am completely alone in its dreamlike memory, my profound grief unspoken, my
loss without a voice, strangled at the back of my throat, a silent cry:
unutterable.
About the Author
Connect with Brittany Batong
Chances Press- info@chancespress.com
Giveaway Info:
Prize is 10 eBook copies of “A Time Apart: A Novel" (1
each to 10 winners). Contest is tour-wide and ends May 10. Must be 18 years of
age or older to enter.Author- brittany@chancespress.com
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