Fiction. In the early 1950s, a young Albuquerque bride accompanies her husband back to his family home in Denmark, then to London and the British colonies of Jamaica and British Honduras. The narrator endures the company of both pathetic and incorrigible characters while struggling to reconcile her idealization of The Modern Marriage with the painful reality of life with a philandering husband. Through the widening eyes of her protagonist, who develops into a woman of depth and vision, Ms. Hawkins creates characters who must adjust to the demands of others and of circumstances. Some relinquish the ability to communicate with others. For a few, adjustment means learning how to communicate with grace and tolerance. Told with humor, compassion, and just a hint of sarcasm, ONE SMALL SAGA ultimately becomes a story of human compromise and adaptation to the quiet disasters of an ordinary life.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins was raised in West Texas, studied art in London (the Slade) and taught in British Honduras. She attended University in Tokyo (Jochi Dai Gaku), while acting on the stage and radio. She has published fifteen books of prose and poetry, including Bijoux (Fafalla Press, 2006), The Sanguine Breast of Margaret (North and South Press, London, 1992), My Own Alphabet (Coffee House Press, 1989), and Own Your Own Body (Black Sparrow Press, 1973). She has received a fellowship in literature from the National Endowment for the Arts and has been teaching at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics, in Boulder, Colorado, since 1987.