Publisher's Synopsis
Ryan, a witty young man with a quick irascible, vile tongue defies his overbearing father, a restaurateur who wants him to work in the family's chain of restaurants and his rebellious streak leads him to pursue a journalism career in protest. Ryan who has been resisting his over-bearing father's overtures arranges a meeting with an acquaintance owner of a tabloid to pitch an idea but the meeting rapidly vitiates into a scuffle that profoundly alters the trajectory of his life .Circumstances compel Ryan to leave the US and he eventually lands in Africa where he ends up on the wrong side of a gun but on the right side of a pen and winds up telling the heart wrenching story of Halma Sedaris, a spunky, impulsive, naïve young girl from a dirt poor family whose step mother drives away from home with her egregious nefariousness. Halma's life of squalor and her Orangutan of a stepmother drives her into a Russian roulette journey full of peril, treachery and innumerable tribulations. Determined to get a better life for herself, she grits her teeth in stoic fortitude and dives into a harrowing roller-coaster of an odyssey where she undergoes abuse, starvation, dehydration, kidnap by cut throat human-traffickers and armed militants as charts her way across the vast Sahara Dessert. She endures and finally gets to Libya from where she seeks to make the deadly crossing across choppy Mediterranean waters in a rickety water craft into Europe. Will she make it with so many odds stacked against her? She had no money and her situation was so dire she might have even considered a church mouse to live in opulence.The misfortune or fate-or whatever the hell you want to call it of civil strife, a deposed president and a Russian nuclear submarine meltdown conspire to bring them into each other's tumultuous orbits.
