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High-spirited and beautiful Sarah Prentice comes from a wealthy family in Palatine, Illinois. She is her father’s baby girl which makes her alcoholic mother jealous and abusive. After graduating from high school in 1972, Sarah flees her dysfunctional home and travels to Venice. She becomes pregnant and her Egyptian lover, Amar, takes her to Cairo. Amar and his sister Zenna treat Sarah graciously as they scheme to abduct Sarah’s baby. Zenna’s husband and only son were recently killed, and Zenna hopes to regain a son for her dead husband’s legacy. Amar and Zenna force Sarah to leave Cairo without her child. 

Sarah returns to her hometown and suppresses the traumatic event like she did her mother’s punishment sessions during childhood. She earns college degrees, marries a wealthy attorney, has a miscarriage, and then gets divorced. After ten years in Palatine, Sarah returns to Cairo and locates her stolen child, a boy named Jamal. At a private school in Cairo, Sarah gets a job as her son’s English teacher. Without revealing her identity to Jamal, Sarah enchants him and he willingly sails up the Nile with her on the adventure of his young life.

My Old Kingdom heroine is Seshet Akeru, an astronomer priestess. When Seshet is five, King Pepi II adopts her from an orphanage. She becomes Pepi’s favorite daughter and marries the Crown Prince, Pepi’s favorite son. During a trade expedition, renegades murder Seshet’s husband, and she miscarries their only child. In repentance, she becomes a priestess who helps mothers and their newborns with her spiritual powers. Through dreams and visions, Seshet guides Sarah during her escapades with her son. Sarah views Seshet Akeru as her guardian angel and her Egyptian avatar. 

When Sarah reveals her identity to Jamal, he resists at first but soon fully accepts Sarah as his mother. On a camel caravan crossing the Nubian Desert, Sarah and Jamal encounter a meteor shower, a desert sandstorm, and a “Bravery Dance” at a nomadic settlement. Sarah experiences her own mental Bravery Dance as she plans her escape from Africa with her son.

The police apprehend Sarah in Khartoum and she spends several months in a Cairo prison. Her father secures her release and she returns to Palatine, tormented by her defeat. She tells a psychiatrist about her “apparitions” in Egypt and the doctor explains that she experienced “multiple personalities” caused by post-traumatic stress disorder from her mother’s abuse. Sarah rejects the psychiatrist’s diagnosis and decides that having a guardian spirit is a much healthier explanation. 

In Paris, Sarah hires a human smuggler who entices Jamal to rendezvous with his mother in Cyprus. 

A twist occurs at the end of the novel. What happens to Sarah and Jamal when Amar shows up on Cyprus? How are Sarah and Seshet Akeru united?

Please read the manuscript on this webpage.

Through the eyes of Stanford Professor Sid Lees, readers see a thousand years of the relic key’s history that includes the tale of a Song Dynasty monk who journeys from Dunhuang, China into Tibet to return the key to the mummified body of Empress Wu. In modern times, a Tibetan lama entrusts Professor Lees with the relic key to deliver to the Dalai Lama and prevent the occupying Chinese from destroying it. 

The novel opens when Professor Lees is on a rickshaw in Kathmandu. The rickshaw crashes into a muddy canal. Sid Lees flees the scene and the rickshaw cabbie Gopan Subba finds the key glimmering in the canal and quickly unravels its magic. Like Odysseus, it takes twenty years before Sid Lees succeeds in his mission to give the key to the Dalai Lama.

Gopan is the novel’s central protagonist. His life’s ambition is to shed his lowly heritage and become a man of worth. Gopan tells the story of how the ancient relic transforms his life into a man of lavish riches. Like the saga of Forrest Gump, Gopan’s actions seem to magnify world events surrounding him. But Gopan begins to feel that his misuse of the magic key causes these tragedies. When the royal massacre occurs in Nepal, Gopan is trying to steal the crown jewels at the royal palace. Police place Gopan under house arrest and he calls upon Sid Lees for help with a promise to return the key. Sid ushers Gopan to Sri Lanka but Gopan is reluctant to give up the key. He feels he needs it to start a new life in a foreign country. He leaves Sid’s apartment without a word and uses the key to acquire new wealth in Columbo. 

During his most extravagant millionaire phase in Sri Lanka, Gopan ventures into the Bollywood filmmaking industry to please the object of his midlife infatuation—a dazzling and ambitious television starlet—which requires an endless series of shrewd subterfuges and grand larceny. Not until after underworld spirits at the Temple of the Buddha’s Tooth destroy his starlet fiancé for her greed and avarice, does Gopan finally return the key to Sid Lees.

During the tsunami in Sri Lanka, Gopan becomes a national hero for rescuing ten people with the use of the key. But he does not feel like a hero. He feels like a fraud and a thief. Gopan moves to Mumbai after he accepts an offer from a Bollywood director to make a documentary about his heroism and the tragic death of his fiancé. Just after he reunites with his Nepalese family that he abandoned years before, he tragically loses them in the terrorist attack at the Taj Hotel.

I invite you to read the novel below to learn how Gopan's story ends. 

Born during a solar eclipse in 1979, Hillary Jacobs grows up a prodigious, only child in a wealthy Philadelphian family. At her bat mitzvah she learns that the father she idolizes, Astrophysicist Sheldon Jacobs, is not her biological father. Devastated, Hillary rejects her religion and emulates Sheldon by focusing on science. Ten years later her world again implodes when her parents die before her Ph.D. graduation in ancient astronomy. When sorting through their house Hillary discovers photos of an unknown codex and the diary of her great-great-grandfather, an early explorer of Mesoamerica. She learns that her distant ancestor was a Mayan warrior queen and she embarks on a journey to uncover the mystery of her heritage. 

Before an expedition to the queen’s tomb, Hillary deciphers the glyphs in the photos at the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City. Frank Guillemont, an eccentric Frenchman twice her age, enters the story and mesmerizes Hillary with his charisma and expertise in Mayan archaeology and religion. Hillary hires Frank as a shaman for her expedition but is unaware that he smuggles antiquities, cross-dresses, and covets the codex she is after for its powers and priceless value. Frank is hoping to transform himself into a god who is both male and female. 

At the Maya ruins, Frank guides Hillary through mystical trances that lead to the story of Yol Tan. The young princess of ancient Palenque is Hillary’s distant ancestor. Yol Tan wants to be a ball player and a warrior, pursuits forbidden to girls. When her father, the historical King Pakal, learns that she is in love with a young lord named Yax K’uh, he arranges Yol Tan’s marriage to the elderly king of Bone Dog. Yol Tan’s new husband switches his allegiance to a rival kingdom and Pakal wages war but loses. Yol Tan secretly rendezvous with Yax K’uh and conceives a daughter, her first lineage heir. Eventually, Yol Tan murders her cruel husband and becomes the ruling queen Jaguar Blood Moon (JBM). She leads a military entrada to Tikal for a Venus transit and conjures up two historic queens who instruct her to battle the enemies of her father. Just as Hillary strives to make her father proud, JBM strives to bring victory to her father’s kingdom. Soon after a triumphant JBM returns to Bone Dog, her son usurps the throne and murders her. 

Fourteen-hundred years later, Hillary locates the warrior queen's tomb and finds the codex. But Frank steals it and Hillary returns to the US feeling defeated. Frank makes a fortune from the ancient Maya text but he misses Hillary and locates her teaching astronomy at Mesa Community College. He asks her to marry him on top of a pyramid during a lunar eclipse where he hopes to make his final transformation. Hillary still loves him and agrees to the ceremony. 

A twist occurs at the end of the novel. What happens to Frank during the lunar eclipse? Why does Hillary land in a Guatemalan jail? And how does she make amends to the memories of both Frank and Jaguar Blood Moon? The manuscript is available upon request.