You are Always Safe with Me

by Merrill Joan Gerber

In this powerful love story that takes place on a Turkish sailing vessel, Lily, a professor at a Florida college, finds herself required to be the companion of her newly widowed mother as they take a cruise along the Turkish coastline on a small sailing ketch. Expecting to endure, though not enjoy, this trip among her mother’s friends, Lily instead finds herself falling in love with Izak, the charismatic Turkish captain of the boat, a man whose powers of kindness, strength and tenderness touch Lily in a way that awaken longings in her she had given up long ago. Lilly’s infatuation with Izak surprises her and at first she resists her feelings, knowing that it would be nearly impossible for an American college professor and a Turkish sailor to find a meeting place to join their lives. However, one day while the others are on a trip away from the boat taking a tour to see the sights, Lily finds herself alone with Izak and their passion reveals itself.

137 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 8, 2013

About the author

Prize-winning novelist and short story writer who has published seven novels — among them King Of The World, which won the Pushcart Press Editor's Book Award for an "important and unusual book of literary distinction," and The Kingdom of Brooklyn, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine for "the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme" — as well as five volumes of short stories, nine young adult novels, and three books of non-fiction.

Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in literary journals such as The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southwest Review, Shenandoah, The Chattahoochee Review and The Virginia Quarterly Review.

She has published essays in The American Scholar, Commentary, The Sewanee Review, Salmagundi and The Writer.

She earned her M.A. in English from Brandeis University and was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship to Stanford University. She presently teaches fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.