Synopses & Reviews
Opening the door to a Nepal few Westerners have encountered,
Exiles is the story of an American volunteer doctor and his teenage daughter whose lives are irrevocably changed when they move to Kathmandu and find themselves in the midst of civil war.
Fleeing the messy dissolution of his marriage, cardiologist Peter Scanlon decides to take a risk and move with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Alex, to Kathmandu, where he plans to volunteer in a free health clinic. Upon arrival, Peter finds himself in a foreign culture that soon challenges his perspectives and beliefs. Nepal—chronically short of medical supplies, a country where children from rural areas often are sold into prostitution—is home to a growing Maoist insurrection, testing Peter in ways he fails to anticipate. His friendship with a Tibetan Buddhist lama, and their discussions of Eastern and Western perspectives on issues including evolution and its effects on the mind and the nature of existence, shift Peter’s framework of understanding. Alex, meanwhile, flourishes as she explores her emerging sexuality and an exciting new culture.
Soon, both father and daughter face an ordeal that threatens not just their beliefs but their very physical survival. When Peter is summoned to aid a pair of Western climbers seriously injured on Mt. Annapurna, his and Alex’s lives become a nightmare of violence and fear.
Suspenseful and thought-provoking, Exiles is an extraordinary debut in which East meets West at the point where lives hang in the balance.
Synopsis
Suspenseful and thought-provoking, Exiles is an extraordinary debut in which East meets West at the point where lives hang in the balance.
Opening the door to a Nepal few Westerners have encountered, Exiles tells the haunting story of an American doctor and his teenage daughter caught in the midst of a civil war.
Fleeing the messy dissolution of his marriage, cardiologist Peter Scanlon decides to take a risk and move with his seventeen-year-old daughter to Kathmandu, where he will volunteer in a free health clinic. But once there, he finds that he failed to anticipate the hardships and dangers: austere living conditions; a chronic shortage of medical supplies; diseases he has never encountered before; the sexual trafficking of young girls; and political instability and an encroaching civil war. At the same time, his friendship and philosophical discussions with a Tibetan Buddhist lama challenge and invigorate Scanlon, and his contentious relationship with the Nepali nurse who works with him gives way to deeper feelings. His daughter, in the meantime, flourishes as she quickly adapts to the new culture and falls in love for the first time. But when Scanlon is summoned to the scene of an accident on Mt. Annapurna, their lives become a nightmare of violence and fear.
Set within an extreme landscape of both beauty and peril, Exiles takes the reader on a gripping adventure that asks profound questions about the nature of our beliefs—and how far we are willing to go to defend them.
About the Author
Cary Groner worked for more than two decades as a journalist, then earned his MFA in fiction writing from the University of Arizona in 2009. His short stories have won numerous awards and have appeared in publications that include Glimmer Train, American Fiction, Mississippi Review, Southern California Review, and Tampa Review. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Exiles is his first novel.