James Hufferd – författare

The narrator, Ana Roiz, the daughter of a well-known journalist in the city of Recife in northeastern Brazil, accepts from among other choices a final internship, required to complete her degree in psychoanalysis from the state university, in the impoverished hamlet of Guararapes located in a scruffy pocket in the seaside hills nearby. Arriving, she experiences initial rejection from the sad-sack residents. Then she receives as a gift from the like-minded slightly older woman, who is the owner of a local cantina, a crystal ball given her by a traveling peddler. Anas new subjects/clients line up for a chance to gaze into it in fascination, and astounded, she proceeds to record a long series of their past-life regressions that emerge coming from leading people active in the area during the era of the spontaneous colonial wars to expel the Dutch occupation in the 1640s. Assembling the pieces of information thus gained, while simultaneously attempting to deal with a serious crisis in her own life and that of her traditional family back in Recife, she and Marina, the cantina owner, grapple with a three-and-a-half-century-old mystery of successive murders, managing to save the miniscule town from dispossession and obliteration by developers of a planned gigantic seaside resortsort of.

The Territory: The Memoir of a Friendship in Earliest Iowa, is a lighthearted but serious work of fiction in the form of a memoir by one of a pair of generally serious, sometimes comical pioneer settlers in pre-territorial and territorial Iowa. Its inspiration is a number of now little-known local and region-wide events described by prominent longtime resident and scholar Benjamin F. Gue in his 1903 History of Iowa. The setting and details of conditions and events, thoroughly researched are portrayed accurately from scores of sources. The intended readership is anyone interested in a reliable information about Iowas pioneer past, the foundations of the present state, and the many issues, large and small, current at the time-span addressed its also written for anyone who enjoys a rip-roaring story full of passages of subtle and sometimes not so subtle humor. Though the work is not lengthy, it portrays virtually every event of relevance for early pre-Civil War Iowa, as well as the tribulations and progress of its two featured pioneers and their families, who get involved in practically everything. The book highlights in particular the opening and development of the land, early settlements and towns, the march of the frontier across the territory and raw new state, the feel of the new land, the way the people were, and the sound and subjects of their daily conversation. The Territory will provide reliable and interesting context for general readers, genealogists, and students of all ages.