Forthcoming Novels by james luger

This story is based on an expedition to the source of the Amazon River with my buddy, Hollis Willeford, on a small thatch-roofed river boat with a guide, cook, and boat pilot. It started from the riverside town of Iquitos, Peru, a sweltering, exotic town populated with colorful characters—there was nothing “normal” about Iquitos. We were there before tourists began to discover the area, and I wanted to accurately depict the natural amazements, dangers, and unchanged aboriginal peoples of the Amazon forest that we found during our trip. I combined that setting with what I learned from first-hand sources about worldwide drug trade that springs from this wild area. This story is scheduled for publication during the first months of 2020. 

A woman tries to protect her son from being hurt by her dysfunctional PTSD war veteran husband one evening that ends with her husband being arrested and her frightened son running away from home. In order to hold her family together, she must convince her husband to get emotional help, but most urgently, she needs to find her son. But her runaway son has allied with an elderly man with dementia who escaped from his nursing home and drove off in a car he thought was his. Together the old man and the boy help each avoid capture during a challenging journey, and the man, a Korean War veteran, helps the boy understand what his father is going through. I have friends who came home from Vietnam with scrambled emotions, a condition known as PTSD, but called “battle fatigue” when my troubled dad came home from flying bombers through the flack and fighter attacks during World War II. I want this novel to help people understand how a war produces wounds that are not always visible. It’s scheduled for publication mid- to late-2020.

Deep in Minnesota’s vast Chippewa Forest, on the Edge of the Wilderness region, my wife, Judy, and I own a lakeshore home . This sparsely populated area is filled with legends, artifacts, and remnants from its rich history of Native Americans, logging camps, and the early riverways of fur trading Voyager’s. I’m particularly interested in a little-known legend of a lost tribe of Ojibway Indians who split with their Ojibway Nation at the Michigan settlement of Sault Ste. Marie, and instead of migrating into Minnesota to battle with the Sioux Indians, this mysterious tribe chose a peaceful route into Canada and simply disappeared. The early Ojibway (also known as the Chippewa, and known to themselves as the Anishinaabe), considered wolves as brothers and sisters, who were created equally by the Great Spirit, but after joining humans to name all things in the world, the wolves went their separate way. How would this genesis story have affected the lost tribe? What happened to those peoples, and how did they conceal their presence? What would have happened if someone from the outside stumbled into their place in the wilds, a vast wilderness that still exists? My novel, PEOPLE OF THE WOLF, will give you a story that attempts to answer those questions;  slated for publication the end of 2020 or beginning of 2021.