Colin Sargent
Colin W. Sargent, Ph.D., is the founding editor & publisher of Portland Monthly magazine as well as a novelist, playwright, and poet. He teaches writing at The College of William and Mary. His latest novel Red Hands has just been released in the US (February 2023).
ABOUT RED HANDS (2023):
A deeply compelling tale of a woman caught inside the destruction of a Communist regime.
Iordana is a normal girl, brought up with all the perks of Romania’s corrupt communist regime. Then she falls in love and marries the eldest son of her parents’ arch-rival, Romania’s monstrous dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. They become the in-laws from hell, but she brings them their only grandson. And then there’s the 1989 revolution, when crowds will kill anyone with the Ceausescu name. In all the blood and chaos, can Iordana keep her little son alive?
Drawn from eighty hours of unique interviews and told in Iordana’s own voice; this true-life tale spins readers into the pleasures, excesses and horrors of late twentieth-century Europe.
Some Blogger Reaction
‘An astonishing work, brilliantly told. In Iordana Ceausescu, Colin Sargent has given us a fascinating window into the brutal regime of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu and their near destruction of Romania. A cautionary tale for our times.’ – Nancy Schoenberger, author of The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters
‘Red Hands is uniquely unsettling and a standout read… a page-turner fuelled by intrigue, blind greed, and staggering accuracy.’ – Victoria Rowell, author of The Women Who Raised Me
‘A fascinating look at Romania — now a staunch NATO ally — as it emerges from the Cold War. Centred on the story of a close relative of feared dictator Ceausescu, it provides a uniquely human frame to the dangerous turbulence of that dynamic and complex period in Eastern Europe.’ – Admiral James Stavridis, USN, Supreme Allied Commander at NATO (2009-2013)
‘Thrillingly good. Sargent tackles the biggest themes — historical change, greed, power, love, desire, and what it means to be free — but at the heart of the book is a gloriously human depiction of one woman’s extraordinary life. A tale from last century and a warning for this one, Red Hands is a novel of rare power that teaches us much about Romania and even more about ourselves.’ – D.D. Johnston, author of The Secret Baby Room The Boston Castrato (Barbican Press, London) was released in both the UK and the U.S.: ‘A heartrending, deep, rip-roaring novel…The Boston Castrato is destined to be a modern classic, a novel that captures 1920s Boston through the eye of a young Italian castrato seeking love.’
–Barbican Press
About The Boston Castrato:
"Sweeping and ambitious."–Kirkus
‘Barbican Press is honoured to launch Colin W. Sargent’s The Boston Castrato – a modern classic in the making. This book does for 1920s Boston what E.L. Doctorow did for New York in Ragtime: it grabs a city out of history, mixes in some fiction and makes it vivid. Be it the high style of Boston’s Parker House Hotel; the flagrant, fragrant set who dance attendance on the poet Amy Lowell; the scientists and shipbuilders and politicians and utter rogues who raise the city from the dirt; it all shimmers into reality as an outsider leads us into its quaking heart.
‘Raffi, a young Italian, is our guide. He left more than his country behind in Rome. Snipped by a bishop as the last castrato, he is bundled off to America when the Church takes shame. Forbidden to use his voice, other skills steal him into the society of 1920s Boston. Raffi enters the hardest quest of all – the search for a genuine love song.’
–Barbican Press; visit http://www.barbicanpress.com/the-boston-castrato-colin-w-sargent/
Museum of Human Beings (McBooks, 2009) was his first novel: Whatever happened to Sacagawea's son?" "Stylish debut," Publishers Weekly. "Spellbinding, five stars," Library Journal.
Author Twitter: @colinwsargent
Author web page: www.colinwsargent.com
Email Colin: colin@colinsargent.com
Follow the author's blog at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14840861.Colin_W_Sargent/blog.
