Bestselling Author
the art of words
Bestselling Author
the art of words
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“There’s plenty of sharp, suspenseful action to savor here in this impressively poignant, hauntingly realistic, and searingly moving tale. Schafer intensively explores themes of racism, violence, war, and human welfare. Vivid, boldly written, life-affirming historical fiction drawn from the horrors of the Rwandan genocide crisis.” —Kirkus Reviews
Now a #1 Amazon Bestseller!
In response to the worldwide epidemic of genocides and to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, Suanne Schafer has issued a second edition of Hunting the Devil, revised and with a new Author’s Note. The electronic edition was free from April 7 through July 15, 2024, the hundred days the 1994 genocide lasted.
Part medical procedural, part global political thriller, part vigilante novel, and part fractured romance, Hunting the Devil moves from the dusty washboard roads of Rwanda to an inner-city hospital in America to the Natural History Museum of Belgium to the halls of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania as it deftly traces one woman’s journey toward justice.
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“The depth of emotion of a modernist novel and the epic scope of a historical saga.” —Alicia Rasley, author of The Year She Fell
Passion & Paint (formerly A Different Kind of Fire) depicts one woman’s battle to balance husband, family, career, and ambition. Torn between her childhood sweetheart, her forbidden passion for another woman, the nobleman she had to marry, and becoming a renowned painter, Ruby’s choices mold her in ways she could never have foreseen…
AVAILABLE NOW!
“The depth of emotion of a modernist novel and the epic scope of a historical saga.” —Alicia Rasley, author of The Year She Fell
Ruby Schmidt has the talent, the drive, even the guts to enroll in art school, leaving behind her childhood home and the beau she always expected to marry. Her life at the Academy seems heavenly at first, but she soon learns that societal norms in the East are as restrictive as those back home in West Texas. Rebelling against the insipid imagery woman are expected to produce, Ruby embraces bohemian life. Her burgeoning sexuality drives her into a life-long love affair with another woman and into the arms of an Italian baron. With the Panic of 1893, the nation spirals into a depression, and Ruby’s career takes a similar downward trajectory. After thinking she could have it all, Ruby, now pregnant and broke, returns to Texas rather than join the queues at the neighborhood soup kitchen. She discovers her life back home is as challenging as that in Philadelphia.
Passion & Paint (formerly A Different Kind of Fire) depicts one woman’s battle to balance husband, family, career, and ambition. Torn between her childhood sweetheart, her forbidden passion for another woman, the nobleman she had to marry, and becoming a renowned painter, Ruby’s choices mold her in ways she could never have foreseen…
COMPLETE BOOK LIST
All the latest on my new book releases, including publishing news, critical acclaim, synopses and purchase information. View current and previous titles, plus a dynamic news feed on everything related to my short stories, articles and novels.
Suanne Schafer, born in West Texas at the height of the Cold War, finds it ironic that grade school drills for tornadoes and nuclear war were the same: hide beneath your desk and kiss your rear-end goodbye. Now a retired family-practice physician whose only child has fledged the nest, her pioneer ancestors and world travels fuel her imagination.
ABOUT SUANNE SCHAFER
Suanne Schafer, born in West Texas at the height of the Cold War, finds it ironic that grade school drills for tornadoes and nuclear war were the same: hide beneath your desk and kiss your rear-end goodbye. Now a retired family-practice physician whose only child has fledged the nest, her pioneer ancestors and world travels fuel her imagination.
In the Time of Our History is a thought-provoking book that delves into family ties, alliances within families, subjugation and independence. Mitra Jahani is an Iranian-American woman who has moved to San Francisco after being disowned by her father. A year earlier,...
In Those People Behind Us, author Mary Camarillo writes of Wellington Beach, California, a beachside community caught in the crossfire between liberals and Trumpsters during the summer of 2017, but the story could be set in any American town. She builds multiple...
Fencing with the King is a fascinating story of Amani, a young Jordanian-American poet exploring her Jordanian roots. She has found a poem that appears to have been written by her paternal grandmother in one of her father’s old books. On the occasion of King Hussein’s...
In The Rule of Thirds, the third (and, alas, the final) book in the Annie Hawkins series, author Jeannée Sacken again draws upon her experience as an international photojournalist to heighten the reality she creates. Annie is a veteran photojournalist who's been...
Beneath the Lion’s Wings is set between Venice and Los Angeles. The novel does an admirable job of capturing the essence of Venice. The female protagonist, Victoria, is a thirty-something woman who works as an executive assistant in a talent agency, who visits the...
Though Loki’s Deceit is the second in the Charlemagne Cross Series series, I was able to get the gist of things without any problems having done a good bit of reading in Norse myths and historical fiction. The book relates European history just after the time of...
Ithaca (The Songs of Penelope #1) is an interesting retelling of The Odyssey, centered on Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, who he left behind when he went off to fight the Trojan War. Eighteen years later, she is still alone. Her son Telemachus is growing up, but her...
There’s a lot to like about This Terrible Beauty. It is historical fiction at its finest, filled with injustice, sacrifice, and redemption. I was drawn to it, as a former photographer, because Bettina Heilstrom, the female protagonist, is a photojournalist, and I was...
The Resurrectionist is a gritty, ominous, atmospheric, bleak gothic novel filled with multiple unreliable narrators and dislikable if not despicable characters. Set in London in the early nineteenth century, it shows the life of people surviving in London’s worst...
Dream Wheels is my second novel by Richard Wagamese (the first being Indian Horse), and I’ve now put all this other works on my to-be-read pile. In both novels, I was impressed by his prose and his storytelling. I sat up most of the night reading it and had to fight...
Cities of Women is a multiple point of view novel that shifts between Verity Frazier, a modern academic, Bèatrice, a medieval French artist, and Christine de Pizan, the French-Italian writer for the court of Charles VI, during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth...
Don’t Forget to Write is a witty, funny, wry, poignant coming-of-age story with marvelous characters and a bittersweet ending. When the protagonist, Marilyn Kleinman, is caught making out with the rabbi’s son in a conservative synagogue in New York City—then refuses...
This is a review of the four-book Jacqueline Kirby mystery series by Elizabeth Peters (The Seventh Sinner, The Murders of Richard III, Die for Love, and Naked Once More). I started them after really enjoying her Amelia Peabody, Egyptologist, mystery series. I found...
Paris in the 1930s was a temple of all cultural forms: music, art, literature, film. Unfortunately, as Nazis moved into occupy France, they dimmed the City of Light. Star Crossed is the story of a Jewish family, the Zelmans, as they intersect first with Paris and then...
Maddalena and the Dark is a dark fantasy or a dark academia-type story set in eighteen-century Venice, mostly at the Ospedale della Pietà, a cloistered school for foundling girls. Most are abandoned at the doorstep and have no known family. As they are raised, if they...
Vincent van Gogh, the most iconic of the Post-Impressionist artists, spends the last few months of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, painting the countryside some thirty kilometers from Paris. He lives in the Ravoux family’s inn. This book is a fictional account of...
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