James Sloan Allen

Life Line James Sloan Allen

Accomplished New York book editor Rebecca Winters, on the threshold of forty and recently yet amiably divorced, looks into herself one day as never before and finds--nothing. Her contented life has gone empty.

Bewildered and fraught, she vacantly buries herself in work, trying to hide her distress from others. A few weeks later, as a favor to a colleague, she grudgingly meets an author with a book to propose. Although author Alex Rodgers unsettles Rebecca with his debonair, whimsical manner and rather aesthetic view of life, his intelligence, wit, and imagination induce her to see him again. And again. And her life begins to take some surprising turns.

Despite her ambivalence toward him, a romance grows as they share the pleasures of New York--in the shadow of 9/11--and talk of many things, revealing ever more of themselves to each other, and to themselves.

This romance also takes them to India, where they find their lives happily altered anew and then caught up in a tragedy that ultimately leads Rebecca to an understanding and affirmation of life she had never known.

Delving into art and religion, palm reading and gambling, perceptions and sentimentality, illusion and reality, and what makes life most worth living, Life Line is at once a novel of ideas and a love story, bringing smiles, tears, and hope.