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I have a memory of her outline in the darkened room, of the sway of the mattress, of the cool sheets wrapped about us, and of the tastes of her mouth as the lightning flashed finally in the skies, I remember the feel of her fingers as they trailed along my shoulder, and how much I needed that touch.

"Things have to be settled, or they never go away."

Only weeks before she dies in March, 1984, Leo Nolan's mother shows her son a rose she says was just given to her by her brother, Jack, who disappeared 50 years earlier. After her death, letters from Jack begin to arrive at the family home. They are postmarked 1934. The final one is from Ashland, Kentucky.

Leo heads to Ashland, to track down the source of the letters... And to find out why they are arriving now, after 50 years.

Time shifts. Time runs underground, then surfaces. It is 1934, and Leo experiences the Great Depression and the ghosts of the past as no one has in 50 years, in Ashland, where dreams die and are born again.

In the acclaimed Shadow of Ashland, Terence M. Green introduced us to the poignant beauty and rich history of his own family. Publishers Weekly called Shadow of Ashland "wonderfully imagined and poetically told.... With Leo's narration as evocative as the pages of a newly discovered family album, this proves a remarkably affecting literary work that the publisher rightly compares to Jack Finney's Time and Again."

Now in A Witness to Life, with his spare but powerful style, Green examines the meaning of life, family, death--the connections that bind us all. The story begins at the moment of Martin Radley's death. His soul, free to drift back over his life, searches for meaning in a welter of change and occasional tragedy. He bears silent witness to his defining moments and the enigmatic patterns of his life.

As Martin grows in a young man in Canada, he meets Maggie Curtis. Soon they are married, have a daughter and son, and are enjoying life. But Maggie dies suddenly, leaving Martin ill-equipped to be the single parent of two teenagers. He does a bad enough job that he loses their respect and the warmth of their affection that he desperately desires. Lost in a muddle, he falls passionately in love with Gertrude McNulty, twenty years younger. He marries her and they have a child. A new wife, a new daughter, new pieces for the puzzle, but as he tries to pull together a new life, his old one slips away. His son, Jack, leaves for the promise of work in the U.S. and disappears. His older daughter marries, withdrawing into her new family, and in a few years Gertrude dies, and Martin once again is left alone to raise a child. Martin is a good man who has failed at something important to him, and now all his love and attention are devoted to his young daughter, for decades. When death finally takes him, Martin is still looking for answers. Now, he has come full circle and has found only a few answers but, perhaps, redemption.

"There's a line drawn across your life. You cross the line forever."

When Leo Nolan's father dies in 1995, his stepson, Adam, now twenty-one, finally asks the question that he has never asked, the question he could never ask. He asks it simply. "Is my father alive?"

St. Patrick's Bed, the sequel to the highly acclaimed, World Fantasy Award finalists Shadow of Ashland and A Witness to Life, revisits Leo's family, eleven years after the momentous visit to Ashland, Kentucky.

Thus begins this new odyssey to Dayton, Ohio, to the past, accompanied by family ghosts and the hard truths of the present. Leo's quest is both simple and complex: the need in the human heart for redemption, resolution and homecoming.