Saturday, August 3, 2013

Reader to Reader's Ophelia Hu Publishes Novel


Congratulations Ophelia!

Reader to Reader’s Navajo Outreach Coordinator, Ophelia Hu, has published her first novel, The Good Fight.

The first two chapters of The Good Fight won the 2012 Williams-Mystic Joseph Conrad Essay Contest.

To order The Good Fight visit Amazon.com.

About The Good Fight

Set somewhere between present and future, The Good Fight introduces a town bisected by a contaminated River, numb to its endless involvement in war, and peaceful – at the surface. The townspeople put no faith in the future and remember no past. Sam, an illiterate prizefighter, lives here with his veteran brother, Rig, and sister-in-law, Camila. Rig once upheld the sport’s accompanying moral code. Now, Sam clings to it. But one day, Rig confides a secret to his wife. Heartbroken yet relieved, Camila agrees with his decision but cannot share the burden with anyone – even Sam, whom she had grown to love in her husband’s absence. Sam and Camila are their own greatest temptations. Their love is sincere but wrought with confusion and hurt that deepen with Rig’s choice. They must crash or repel, or else destroy themselves in limbo. Meanwhile, Lyons’ peace unravels and the townspeople point fingers, at last realizing that they possess both the wound and the weapon. Ophelia Hu’s debut novel gives us a moving portrait of self and circumstance, familiarizing the strange and estranging the familiar as the characters struggle to navigate a world that could be dystopian if it were not our own. The Good Fight captures tragic love and its more tragic absence, the burden of ignorance, and the audacity of forgiveness.


About the Author

Ophelia Hu earned her B.A. in Environmental Studies in 2012 from Amherst College, where she wrote a novella about misremembered Ethiopian environmental history for her senior thesis. The first two chapters of The Good Fight won the 2012 Williams-Mystic Joseph Conrad Essay Contest. Her fiction has appeared in The Common and HESA Inprint. She now lives and works in the Navajo Nation for Reader to Reader, Inc., a global literacy nonprofit, and she organizes local writers’ workshops to encourage members to be the tellers of their own stories and investors in their own futures. Ophelia is a storyteller of many media. Also a pianist, singer, and songwriter, she combs each day for folk tales, misheard words, and unwritten vignettes. An avid traveler, she now resides in a trailer in canyon country, where the unbroken highway and unbridled horses are the stuff of stories.

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