The story:

Reporter Joanna Barnes must learn to decipher the hazy line between memory and stories as she embarks on a quest to find the father who abandoned her thirty years ago. While Joanna unravels the mystery of Henry Barnes' disappearance in Rwanda, just after the 1994 genocide, she is also looking for a missing piece of herself. She fears that when her father left her as a child, he took the piece that really knows how to love—like a daughter and a mother.

In Rwanda, Joanna stays with Henry’s former mistress, Lillian, an expat from Atlanta who runs an orphanage at the foot of the Virunga Mountains. As Joanna is drawn into the daily lives of Lillian and the children, she slowly learns to trust the connections she’s making, including an American doctor running from his past and a young Rwandan woman seeking justice twelve years after the genocide.

Together, this group of lost souls—black and white, African and American—help each other find the courage to love again. During the process of searching for her father, Joanna discovers somehing she's been missing her entire life: family.

The Memory of Stories is a gripping, sweeping tale of a woman’s search for love interwoven with her father’s quest for redemption. I went to Rwanda in 2006, and found the inspirational stories and poetic landscape that are the bones of this debut novel.

Check out a slideshow of my trip to Rwanda with a musical score by composer Joseph Weisnewski.