Backshadow

Some women keep secrets, and some women are kept by their secrets. Like shadows they follow, intimately connected to flesh and blood, a lingering reminder of something past, something dark... Pinned in India, Japan, and America, BACKSHADOW is the story of three women from three very different worlds. Three whose secrets keep them silent, haunted captives. When lives ultimately intersect in a San Francisco college creative writing class, the women are drawn into the tentative beginnings of what seems on the surface a most unlikely friendship. A hard-edged cynic with a load of emotional baggage, much of which happens to be tied to her gender-bending first name, Gregory is the living legacy of a man she'd rather forget: her daddy. Stuck in a life he never wanted, he'd always been determined to make someone pay for his bitterness at circumstance. Until the night she'd had no choice but to step in and stop him. As a girl of only thirteen, grey-eyed Indian beauty Aneeta is robbed of the one thing she can never get back. By a thief she has both loved and trusted. For years shame keeps her silent. Until the day the balance of power shifts, and she finally finds the courage to speak out. But her revelation unleashes a heart-rending chain of events that see her exiled as a bride to America, and traded from one nightmare into another. It is duty that prompts Kameko to marry, not choice; her desire to satisfy a dying mother's last wish and to make amends for long ago disappointments. But as she struggles to fulfill an age-old Japanese feminine ideal in a faraway city whose culture is markedly different from what she knows, she begins to question the choices and concessions she has made. It is the cruelest of ironies that finally sets her adrift, like a fallen leaf upon the stream. By turns heartbreaking and hopeful, BACKSHADOW crosses continents and cultures to consider some of the most provocative, poignant and stigmatizing issues affecting women in the world today. It is the story of three women catching the courage to confront the shadows of the past, and of the comfort that comes from knowing we are not alone.