My new novel - my fourth - ponders the intersection of past, present, and future in a series of letters.

Imagining an afterlife keeps humans from losing hold of the one slender concept that keeps us living in the present: hope. Hope is the thing that causes the suddenly traumatized heart to beat once more and then one more and one more time. That’s all it takes to stay alive. And a hoped-for reunion with our loved one nourishes our dreams of Heaven. Since the death of my son, Najeeb, I’ve cultivated a particular concept of the afterlife. Coalescing these fertile pictures with words on a page has taken a long time. "Alive Nearby" is a view of that place. "Alive Nearby" is a work of fiction, an intensely personal clutch of letters that capture a woman’s thoughts and feelings about the intersection of her personal past and her family’s historical records.