Some stories don’t need to get their hair coifed or their teeth whitened before going out in public.

Sailing Grace, honored as “Best New Non-Fiction Book” by Indie Awards, a finalist for USA Book News’ “Best Books” award, and as a “Michigan Notable Book”, is one of those stories.  She introduces herself this way:

        After eight visits to surgery in eight months, “heart transplant” is working its way into conversations with John’s doctors.

John and Barbara are talking about going sailing instead.

This true story, narrated with present-tense immediacy, begins with John flat on his back in a local health club, gasping for air.  It ends thirty-one months and four thousand miles later when he, Barbara, and their two youngest children maneuver their sailboat, Grace, into Schull Harbor, Ireland.  A gritty account of their family’s struggle to do better than simply survive, it is also a commentary on how love heals,  dreams energize, and trauma can be a wake-up call.  From hospital ward to the stormy Atlantic, this hard-edge story will resonate with anyone who has struggled with profound adversity - be it divorce, disease, depression, financial crisis, or the “heavy weather” that unexpectedly blows through every life.

        An international edition of Sailing Grace will be published by Adlard Coles (London) in the summer of 2009. It will be entitled Outrageous Grace, and will be sold everywhere in the world, with the exception of the United States.

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from the upcoming video Alive, Awake, at Sea