This Is Paradise by Suzanne Strempek Shea
Your brakes fail and your car plunges from a pier into a February-frigid harbor. You are thrown to safety but your four-month old daughter, trapped in her car seat, drowns. Four years after that horror, you return from a trip to the shore and lift your four-month-old son from his carrier only to realize he's dead, too, a victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Twenty-two years later, your 25-year old son drowns while swimming in a Malawi, Africa lake. How do you survive that first death, never mind the second, or the third? Ask Mags Riordan of County Kerry, Ireland. Only the blessing of her son Billy, the boy who later drowned, carried Mags through those first two deaths. Her reaction to Billy's loss caused Mags to do something beyond simple survival, though - it caused her to do something transformative, and remarkable. Returning to Malawi on the one-year anniversary of Billy's death, she saved the life of a local boy who would otherwise have died from a simple infection, and realized the desperate need for a medical clinic. With virtually no relevant experience, medical or otherwise, Mags founded a clinic that to date has saved and transformed the lives of tens of thousands of Malawians. If any of us wonders What can one person do? we need only look to Mags Riordan as a living, breathing example of someone who put aside her despair, and her comfort zone, in an effort to help and heal, proving the world truly can be changed, even by just two hands, and one single broken heart.
Shea, Suzanne Strempek: - Suzanne Strempek Shea, winner of the 2000 New England Book Award for Fiction, is the author of the novels Selling the Lite of Heaven; Hoopi Shoopi Donna; Lily of the Valley; and Around Again; and the memoirs Songs from a Lead-Lined Room: Notes -- High and Low -- From My Journey Through Breast Cancer and Radiation; and Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama, and Other Page-Turning Adventures from a Year in a Bookstore. She lives in Bondsville, Massachusetts.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780989237291 |
| ISBN 10 | 098923729X |
| Title | This Is Paradise |
| Author | Suzanne Strempek Shea |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Pfp |
| Year published | 2014-04-02 |
| Number of pages | 310 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |