Satisfy My Soul

I have called you here to reveal to you a truth that has been calling to you for many years. . . . Since then your soul has been seeking rest.

Playwright Carey McCullough is a close guardian of his privacy, haunted by a recurring dream and a damaged past he would like to keep there. But some things he can never forget. And the more he pushes them away, the more uprooted he feels. The women he has loved, lusted after, rejected, and embraced represent a lifetime of trial and error, adventure and compromise. Then, while in Jamaica, he crosses paths with a radiant woman who attracts him like a flame.

Then he remembers. The first time Carey saw Frances, she was singing a blues song on a videotape. Of course then she was just a nameless face, a hazy image that he could never quite get out of his mind. Now she has entered his life in the flesh. But this undeniable attraction is much more than chemistry. As Carey soon discovers from a “reader” of the spirit world, he and Frances share a history that has linked their souls for more than four hundred years. Though Carey views past lives with skepticism, he cannot explain knowing the language of an ancient African people—in particular the phrase: “Mulewe anekoso kuduwe bana” (“I will search until I find you”).

Yet Frances conceals secrets of her own, with devastating consequences. And while Carey visits his best friend and fellow playwright, Kwabena Small, in South Carolina, a bond that was once thought to be unbreakable will be put to the ultimate test as startling truths at last emerge. . . .

In a stunning novel of extraordinary power that involves a mystical journey to Ghana, Colin Channer combines profound questions of faith, the aching search for home, the long reach of history, and the double-edged sword of passion to dazzling effect. Satisfy My Soul will linger in yours long after the final page is turned.

Colin Channer is the author of two novels, a novella, and many short stories. His first novel, Waiting in Vain, was selected as a 1998 Critic’s Choice by the Washington Post. It was also excerpted in Hot Spots: The Best Erotic Writing in Modern Fiction. His novella, I’m Still Waiting, was published in the bestselling volume Got to Be Real. Mr. Channer is founder and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival, the only annual literary festival in the English-speaking Caribbean (www.calabashfestival.org). A naturalized American, he was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and lives with his family in New York. He has taught fiction writing in London and New York and is the bass player for the reggae band Pipecock Jaxxon.

Write to him at colinchanner@hotmail.com
or visit his Web site at www.colinchanner.com