By Alan O’Hashi, Publisher
Lately, I’ve been organizing some of my work—and discovering that several of my novels have been talking to one another all along.
I call them The Libby Flats Saga.
The saga currently includes three novels: The Gathering at Libby Flats, Vengeance at Stone Creek, and What the Morning Brings. They aren’t traditional sequels. Each book stands on its own, with its own story, characters, and time period. But they share a fictional universe, with characters, places, and pieces of history occasionally crossing paths.
At the center of that universe is Libby Flats, a place in Wyoming’s Medicine Bow Mountains where memories, relationships and unfinished business have a way of resurfacing.
The Gathering at Libby Flats
In The Gathering at Libby Flats, Elizabeth Steiner returns to Boulder from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to attend her dying mother Becca’s funeral. Her return brings together people who haven’t seen one another in nearly four decades.
Elizabeth, Gary, Avery and Jack share a complicated history that reaches back to the 1960s, when they spent summers at Quiver Mountain Ranch near Lander, Wyoming. Old friendships, love, rebellion, and betrayals shaped their lives, and eventually drove them apart.
Now they gather again at Libby Flats to fulfill a promise Becca made decades earlier.
Set partly in contemporary Boulder and partly in the Wyoming of the past, the novel explores what happens when the past refuses to stay buried—and whether it is ever too late to make peace with it.
Buy The Gathering at Libby Flats
Vengeance at Stone Creek
Vengeance at Stone Creek takes a darker turn into the history behind one of the characters who appears in The Gathering at Libby Flats.
Tak Fujiyama is the son of a Japanese American family whose story stretches from the Japanese American community in San Pedro, California to the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. His family eventually opens a Japanese restaurant in Laramie, but Tak carries a much older wound.
During the war, senseless violence at an incarceration camp leaves a mark that doesn’t disappear when the barbed wire comes down. Tak’s search for justice and revenge forces him to confront what happened to his family and what it means to carry the consequences of injustice across generations.
The novel is part historical fiction, part mystery, and part revenge story, but at its heart it asks a simple question: What happens when an injustice is never made right?
What the Morning Brings
What the Morning Brings takes the saga into the summer of 1968, when America seems to be coming apart at the seams.
Inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the novel reimagines Hemingway’s world of disillusionment and privilege in Boulder during the 1960s Vietnam War, civil rights movement, and social upheaval.
Hemingway’s Jake Barnes finds himself in Boulder, where he encounters a minor character from Vengeance at Stone Creek. The meeting connects Hemingway’s fictional world with my own and turns a familiar literary landscape into something distinctly Western and distinctly American.
The rodeo, Vietnam, Boulder, and Cheyenne replace the cafés and bullfights of post-World War I Europe. Beneath the surface, however, the same questions remain: What do we do after the world we believed in falls apart? Where do we go when we no longer belong to the world that made us?
Three stories. One fictional world.
The three novels move back and forth through time, but they share a common concern: how the past shapes who we become and how much power we have to change what comes next.
The Libby Flats Saga isn’t finished. I’m still discovering connections between the characters, places, and stories. That’s one of the pleasures of creating a fictional world: sometimes the characters know where they’re going before I do.
For now, these three books provide three different doorways into that world.
Welcome to Libby Flats.
