Nights of the Road

The Book: \\ \\ The world of twenty-first century US rock music intertwines with life at the seventeenth-century English court of King James the First. Both places and periods come to sparkling life, with impeccable attention to historical and geographical detail, in Nights of the Road.\\ \\ The Story: \\ \\ Fourteen-year-old Frances Coke is promised by her society mother, Lady Elizabeth Hatton, that she can marry for love, but everything changes when her famous father, Sir Edward Coke, falls out of favor with James the First. To retrieve his position, Coke sacrifices his daughter in marriage to the manic-depressive brother of the King's lover, the Duke of Buckingham.\\ \\ Buckingham and his rapacious mother want the lands and wealth promised with Frances, but have no intention that she should bear her husband, Viscount Purbeck, a child. Their machinations to keep the two apart send Frances into the arms of Sir Robert Howard, son of a rival noble house...\\ \\ In 21st Century California, Sarah James knows nothing about seventeenth-century heiresses when she arrives in Los Angeles, although she does believe she has left her own abusive marriage and unhappy past behind her in England. Her therapy practice is flourishing, she loves her ocean-side apartment, and she is enjoying a promising new relationship with American rock music promoter, Bob Howard.\\ \\ But Sarah's world is turned upside down when a British musician kidnaps and holds her in his isolated cabin in the California desert. Is her drink-sodden captor only using Sarah as a pawn to coerce Howard into mounting a tour for his failing rock career? Or does he have ancient scores to settle with both Sarah and Bob?\\ \\ Sarah finds herself obliged to travel across time and continents to free herself and heal an ancestral legacy marred by patriarchal abuse of power. She must also aid a tormented man to transform his present ruinous path into a road to resurrection.\\ \\ Her greatest ally in her quest will be that real-life, seventeenth-century heiress. Frances Coke, For young Viscountess Purbeck, although alive four centuries before Sarah, in an era when women knew no legal safeguards, steadfastly refused to submit to the ongoing corruption and persecution of her Court, Church and King. She has remarkably modern advice to offer.\\ \\ What People Say: \\ \\ " A compelling story that brings two time periods richly and vividly to life. It's a big, bold, ambitious and thought-provoking book and I found myself thinking about it a long time after I had finished it." Nicola Cornick, international best-selling author.\\ \\ "Rock music meets the Stuart royal court in this haunting tale of two heroines, each as beleaguered as she is loved. This novel of swashbuckle and self-discovery shifts between time and place - from hipster LA to the ruined ramparts of Corfe Castle. Read it fast for its pyrotechnical plot, or savor more slowly as a literary spritzer for the soul." Madeleine Kingsley, journalist and book reviewer.\\ \\ "Nights of the Road is a remarkable debut novel by Midi Berry. It is a captivating page turner expertly weaving the fictional life of Sarah James in current Los Angeles with the historically accurate past of Lady Francis Purbeck, a feisty 17th century English heiress. After finishing this book, one can only wonder 'Have I been here before?' A must read!" June Sobel, best-selling author.