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Changing Hands

Changing Hands is the tale of one opal ring that makes its way through several centuries in the hands of vastly different owners. Multi-layered characters exchange ownership while slices of history dominate their survival and subsequent fate.

The story begins in the mid-1700s when James Newcomb Sr., traveling across the English countryside, ignores warnings by the locals and purchases a silver jewelry box containing exotic jewelry, one of which is a magnificent opal ring. Upon his death, the book journeys to the home of an eccentric artist and the opal’s strange arrival. Love and deception lead the reader to the Arctic Ocean aboard an expedition following the transit of Venus.

Cast in the shadows of love, morality, and greed, the book follows a story thread from one character to another in a span of several centuries. However, the appeal of the novel is not the reader following one person and exiting to another, but rather the following of an idea: the idea that humans in all times and locations are powerfully enticed and seduced by something we can never possess.

Blank – Book Trailer

Imagine the world just reset itself, everything goes Blank, and humankind can’t remember the past. No one knows how much time has passed since the Blank; no one remembers much of the time before. Set in a dystopian version of Earth, where seeds are used to barter for goods, we meet the sisters Danube and Amazon Rivers along with the Bailiwick brothers, Alabama and Nebraska. The four youths grew up in the same town, and one day they stumbled across the mysterious Alice, who appeared out of nowhere. But unlike the four and their mundane lives, Alice knows how the world came to be in its current state. Told in the third person while displaying multiple character points of view, Nanette L. Avery’s novel Blank distinguishes life not endowed with ready-made meaning and the characters who are responsible for creating their own. The world everyone knew before is gone, and the one they have ended up in operates by a completely different set of rules. Alice’s existence may very well destroy what humanity has rebuilt, but she must complete the mission she was entrusted with at any cost.