About this item
Against the Wind is an elegantly written story of relationships involving six principal characters, strands of whose lives braid together after a chance reunion among three of them. A successful environmental lawyer is forced to take himself to task when he realizes that everything about his work has betrayed his core beliefs. A high school English teacher asks her former high school love to take up her environmental cause. A transgender adolescent male raised by his grandparents struggles to excel in a world hostile to his kind. A French-Canadian political science professor finds himself left with a choice between his cherished separatist cause and his marriage and family. An accomplished engineer is chronically unable to impress his more accomplished father sufficiently to be named head of the international wind technology company his father founded. The Quebec separatist party's Minister of Natural Resources, a divorce, finds herself caught between her French-Canadian lover and an unexpected English-Canadian suitor.
About the Author
Jim Tilley writes both poetry and prose. His debut novel, "Against the Wind," will be released by Red Hen Press of Pasadena, California in the fall of 2019. "The Elegant Solution," his short memoir about his relationship with his father, a relationship grounded in the language of mathematics but exposed in an engaging manner accessible to non-mathematical audiences, was first published in 2013 as an e-book and was then included in an anthology of Ploughshares Solos. Jim's poetry is published by Red Hen Press; his third collection, "Lessons from Summer Camp," was released in 2016; his second, "Cruising at Sixty to Seventy," in 2014; and his first, "In Confidence," in 2011. His work has appeared in several top literary journals, including Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, New Orleans Review, Cimarron, and Hotel Amerika. He has won Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize for Poetry, New England Poetry Club's Firman Houghton Award, and an International Publication Award from Atlanta Review. Four of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Jim earned a doctorate in Physics from Harvard University. During his 25-year career in insurance and investment banking, he wrote several prize-winning papers on finance and investments. In 2008, the International Insurance Society announced Tilley as the winner of its Beckley Award for his pioneering work in asset-liability management. He resides with his wife, Deborah Schneider, in Bedford Corners, New York, and can be contacted through his author website www.jimtilley.net
