William Luvaas

Welcome to Saint Angel: ($20, 220pp, 6X9”: Softcover ISBN: 978-1-68114-320-0; $35: Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-68114-321-7; $2.99: EBook ISBN: 978-1-68114-322-4; LCCN: 2017937186; Satire; Release: March 16, 2018; Purchase on Amazon, IndieBound, or Barnes & Noble): Iconoclastic inventor, Al Sharpe, loves his canyon home in Southern California’s Saint Angel Valley. He builds his teenage daughter a tree house in a giant oak and invents the Sharpe Smoke Scrubber to detoxify wood smoke. When wealthy developer Ches Noonan, a fellow member of the Desert Green Lawn Association, sets out to fill the valley with houses and appropriate its precious water supply to fill swimming pools during California’s worst drought, Al and his quixotic pals rebel. In the Realty Revenge, they halt development through madcap high jinks and the help of local Indians, ancient demon Tahquitz, and mother nature. Welcome to Saint Angel is a dead-serious comedy about development gone mad and townsfolk’s attempts to protect their rural Arcadia from bulldozers and climate change deniers. Part environmental fiction, part social satire, it speaks to exurban sprawl and the heedless development of fragile natural areas and to the power of communal resistance in the face of calamity.

Book Trailer: Winner of the Best Adapted Screenplay Award in the Golden State Film Festival

“Sure-fire satire of contemporary America… Fortunately for the reader, this author’s passion—his anger, too—come wrapped in a healthy sense of the absurd. Dangerous plot lines veer off into farce. The people who drive them leap off into engaging parodies of themselves. And the reader is caught, along with Luvaas, in a parlous place somewhere between outrage and hilarity… Nature, keenly observed and described throughout in rich and sharp-edged detail, is the primary victim in this tale… The hair-raising climax of her nightmare coincides with a final, apocalyptic confrontation in which Luvaas treats us to the epic spectacle of those all-too familiar behemoths of construction equipment engaged in mortal conflict with the last-ditch defenders of what remains of private property.” —Los Angeles Review of Books, Peter Clothier, “Between Outrage and Hilarity: William Luuvas’s Welcome to Saint Angel”, April 12, 2018

“A painful, redemptive belly laugh and well worth it.” —Doug Peacock, Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness

“Welcome to Saint Angel is a love story. It’s about a love of the land, a love of place, a love of community, a love of humanity, flawed and full of missteps and mistakes as it may be. It’s about a love that connects people and places.” —Elan Barnehama, Forth Magazine

“William Luvaas writes with immense verve and imagination, and has a gift for humour: Al’s pet pig Wallers possesses a genius for comic timing and porcine know-how that makes him one of the finest characters in the novel. The author is also able to describe the flora of the desert and the ways of dust and stone, water and mud, with microscopic precision.” —Jack Messenger in Feed the Monkey, Midwest Book Review

“To protect a space where we at last find ourselves rooted—it is in this use of absurdity and humor amid a dreadful conflict that illustrates Luvaas’ masterful technique of shifting points of view and uses of shifting dialogues, interior to character-to-character, and gives voice to the landscape that underscores the quick pace of this read… The reader is gifted to follow these complex and interlaced agendas that may lead to ruin or as happens in most wars, devastation of landscape so that the controller can emerge as victor… These are the lives Luvaas offers up to paint a canvas of a place where character and land are as integrated and essential to one another as space and time. Where the end (if there is to be an end to brokenness), gives us the ultimate crescendo.” —The Wagon Magazine, Robin Throne, September 2018

“You will find yourself cheering on the efforts of this community, who want to preserve their way of life, and an environment far older than mankind. A well written and enjoyable novel.” —Sally Georgina Cronin, Smorgasbord Invitation

Book Recommendation: Readers Circle

“Every time we allow ourselves to settle back into the deep currents of William Luvaas’ Welcome to Saint Angel, imagining we see what he’s doing and where he’s going, we find ourselves in new waters, trying to master different strokes. And what an amazing ride this accomplished writer takes us on—through heartache and mystery, laughter and sweet vengeance. Beyond everything, he makes us truly welcome, welcome inside an endangered environment that asks from us what so many here in Saint Angel have to offer. Without ever hectoring us, Luvaas reforms our thoughts and our capacities to fit a world both harder and more loving than we had previously ever supposed. It is a word badly overused, but this novel really is the product of a true brilliance.” —Jim Kincaid, Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California

William Luvaas has published three novels, The Seductions of Natalie Bach, Going Under, and Beneath The Coyote Hills, and two story collections, A Working Man’s Apocrypha and Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle, The Huffington Post’s 2013 Book of the Year and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, first place in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open Contest, The Ledge Magazine’s Fiction Contest, and Fiction Network’s 2^nd National Fiction Competition. His work has appeared in dozens of publications, including Antioch Review, The American Fiction Anthology, Glimmer Train, Grain Mag., North American Review, The Sun, Texas Review, The Village Voice and The Washington Post Book World. He has taught writing at San Diego State University, U.C. Riverside, and The Writers Voice in New York, and is Online Fiction Editor for Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts. Luvaas lives in Los Angeles with his wife Lucinda, an artist and film maker. Website: www.williamluvaas.com.