This image is the cover for the book Turning Over

Turning Over

For several years, Robert Kelley lived a primitive and contented life in a fishing village in the mangrove swamps of Sierra Leone. There, he developed and managed a project that built a cooperative fisheries station to support remote coastal villages. His development work done, he reluctantly turns the station over to the corrupt government Fisheries Division, whom he knows from experience will simply steal its resources and go away, leaving the villagers poorer than ever. He travels to Freetown, the capital, to present his last report to his employer, an English development agency, and leave Sierra Leone for Mali to join Marie, with whom he's had an intermittent and intense love affair. But when he arrives in Freetown, his superior offers him another position, establishing and managing a new project in the heart of a politically unstable region of the country. Robert hesitates to accept, for he has already committed himself to joining Marie. His decision embroils him in unexpected and violent consequences. This love story of two expatriates is set against a lushly pictured West Africa in which the echoes of colonial, and even pre-colonial, life are still evident in the corrupting power of the Big Man and the equally corrupting privilege that surrounds white expatriate life. The Turning Over vividly portrays the last vestiges of that epoch in a world disintegrating into chaos.

William McCauley

Bill McCauley was born in Oklahoma of Depression-era parents who lived some of the migrant life of the Okies depicted in Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," settling in California during the war years. After the war, again looking for work, they took their family of three children to Washington, to Oregon, back to Oklahoma, thence to Kansas, and finally to Seattle, there to stay. Bill, their eldest, had a life in all those places. At the University of Washington he earned undergraduate degrees in Geological Oceanography and Scientific and Technical Communication. From his earliest years, he loved the way the language in books discovered new worlds that could be experienced in the mind. He started writing early, but was easily diverted by life. It was only in his middle age that he brought together the experience he'd gained writing all those hundreds of fragments with the discipline to work every day, and developed the writing habit that motivates him now. He lives (and writes every day) in Auburn, Washington.

Open Road Integrated Media