A Time Apart: A Novel
by Brittany Batong
Time-Travel Romance
Publisher: Chances Press, LLC
Release Date: Feb 25, 2013
Heat Level: Sensual
Word Count: 105,000
Buy Links
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Description
A Time Apart explores the bittersweet duality of our existence among
the past and the present, through the eyes of Kara, a twenty-something art
school graduate who has resigned herself to contentment in the routines of
everyday family life as a commuting suburbanite.
An unexpected attraction to Jake, a slacker-colleague in her office,
is further complicated when a visit to a lavish old movie palace initiates a
journey into the past. Kara and Jake inexplicably find themselves thrown into
the turbulence of Los Angeles during the Great Depression, maintaining a
feigned marriage as inhabitants of a boarding house in a forgotten community of
Los Angeles called Bunker Hill. As partners in a past that is both exciting and
adversarial, Jake and Kara begin to develop very real romantic feelings for one
another, even as they are bound to identities in a time that does not yet
exist.
A Time Apart follows two people as they discover a Los Angeles beyond
their separate lives, beyond all comprehensible experience, and beyond that
which is real or imagined.
Excerpt
Preface: 2011
Sometimes I walk around downtown, imagining it not as this Los
Angeles, but as our Los Angeles. My mind strips away the high-rises and the
mirrored glass, isolating what is left of the city that we knew, surrounding it
with the familiar places we walked; supplementing the self-absorbed
professionals of the Financial District (who seem to me to talk to themselves
but really into their hands-free devices) with instead the department stores
and proprietors of “Art Lane”, defying the assumptions of the highbrow set,
making statements and movements with their thoughts and their art. What would
they think of this overly polished place their world has become?
I wander to 6th Street, seeing not the jumbled mix of cheap eateries
and plain façades, but the warm bookshops burgeoning with poetry and
compatriots; imagining the streets not with orange Metro buses and blue DASH
buses, but instead with red and yellow cars that sail past on their cable
connections, Delia reaching out to grab them, her laughter ringing in my ears.
And then I think of Jake, my mind carrying me to all the places we
walked that first day. Sometimes I retrace our steps from the Theatre District,
with its treasure trove of lavish movie palaces, to Pershing Square, where my
reverie allows me to push away the gaudy concrete and primary colors of a park
redesign gone wrong; and instead see the trees and grass of that other Los
Angeles. My eyes continue to the grand old Biltmore Hotel, still as proud and
dignified as it was and now somewhat out of place, and I smile as I think of
that first night. If only I could dream vividly enough, I could bring to life
the steep incline up Olive Street to Bunker Hill and find my way home to our
old Victorian, up the concrete steps and through the creaky porch, into the
parlor where our friends gather, spinning records on the old Victrola while I
trip on the back step as Jake tries to waltz me around the room. My heart
begins to throb in my throat and tears sting at my eyes.
But on I walk, as if it is the only way to keep those memories real.
It is when the memories are their most vivid that I chance upon a
group of colleagues, who smile at me and say “hello”. I smile back but resent
this invasion, this reminder that the place we knew is no longer here. That
place, that life that we lived before us, before now, is gone forever. I am
completely alone in its dreamlike memory, my profound grief unspoken, my loss
without a voice, strangled at the back of my throat, a silent cry: unutterable.
About the Author
Brittany Batong finds that the most fascinating stories lie within the
hearts of seemingly ordinary people. She enjoys working and playing in Downtown
Los Angeles, uncovering its hidden treasures; and lives in Santa Clarita,
California with her husband and two kids.
Connect with Brittany Batong
Chances Press- info@chancespress.com
Author- brittany@chancespress.com