Don't Let Truth Be a Casualty

Read Lauren Francis Sharma's latest novel, Casualties of Truth

Friends and Readers,

I have the pleasure of sharing with you news about my friend Lauren Francis Sharma’s newest (third) brilliant novel—Casualties of Truth.

In Lauren’s own words, “My latest novel, ‘Casualties of Truth,’ is inspired by my time at the South African Amnesty Hearings held in 1996. I was a young law student and I didn't know that I would one day become a novelist, but I knew that my time there would change me forever. The hearings were intended to heal a post-Apartheid South Africa through transparency and accountability, but it left me, and many others, questioning whether justice had been served. My novel asks this question and centers around an American woman who realizes far too late that the new "IT whiz" hired by her husband's D.C. law firm is a man she met while at the hearings decades earlier. Theirs is a complicated past that she suddenly realizes she will not be able to shake. The story is being called a literary thriller, but it is also a story about family and societal obligations, and perhaps more than anything, it's concerned with how far people will go on behalf of those in power and how far people will allow themselves to be pushed without recompense.”

Can you imagine a fierier, more topical subject for fiction today, when most of the world’s people are smarting under the whips and boots of insolent, ruthless injustice? When there are millions suffering in Ukraine and Gaza because lawless despots have been allowed run amok and wreak havoc on humanity?

And these are just the tip of the iceberg, the stories that the news and media like to chomp on the most, and for which perhaps there is the greatest morbid public appetite. Because history repeats itself, but we forget. That’s why people have almost forgotten Apartheid, the scourge of its time, a silent genocide, which forms the backdrop of Lauren’s story.

So please go out and pre-order this book today, and order one for your local and public library too while you’re at it.

Happy reading!