Fiction. In his application to become the spiritual leader of the King Solomon Motorcycle Club, Norman Plummer recalls the momentous events that shaped his life during one sultry Los Angeles summer. Set in 1963--after the Cuban Missile Crisis, but before JFK's assassination--Norman begins to prepare Bel Air heiress Bayla Adler for a bat mitzvah she doesn't want. The studious teenage son of a ne'er-do-well gambler, Norman finds himself in a strange new world of trophy wives, pool boys, and plastic surgeons--a world where anything might be bought, except the cooperation of the beautiful Bayla. In an unforgettable story of lost innocence and found passion--of love and motorcycles-readers will be rooting for this unlikely couple and their bid to change the world.

Author Hometown: NEW HAVEN, CT USA



About the author: Born in Chicago in 1946 and raised in Los Angeles, Allan Appel is a novelist, poet, and playwright whose books include Club Revelation, High Holiday Sutra, winner of a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and The Rabbi of Casino Boulevard, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. His writing has appeared in The National Jewish Monthly, The Progressive, and National Lampoon, and his plays have been produced in New York, Chicago, New Haven, and Provincetown. He has published a total of six novels, a biography, two collections of poetry, a book on botany, and A Portable Apocalypse, a handy anthology of erudite and humorous quotations about the end of the world. Among his plays, Dear Heartsey, a staged adaptation of the letters of a colonial New Yorker, Abigail Franks, was commissioned by the American Jewish Historical Society, and was presented, starring Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach, at the Jewish Museum in New York, and at Queens College, City University of New York, and at Yale University. In 2003, Flight, a play about the perils of patriotism, was presented in a staged reading by the New England Academy of Theatre in New Haven.

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