The Foreign Service Journal, November 2003

Affairs . For more information and to order the book go to http://www.thebookden.com. Hard Sleeper: A Novel of Old and New China Jennifer Scheel Bushman and Jean Artley Szymanski, Lost Coast Press, 2003, $24.95, hardcover, 253 pages. “A spellbinding tale weaving the power of an indomitable woman through some of the most tumul- tuous times in 20th century China … it is one of those rare books that you simply hate to finish.” That is what former U.S. Ambassador to China J. Stapleton Roy says about this novel that tells the story of Jane McPherson, the daughter of an American missionary couple whose parents are brutally murdered in 1936. Jane and her brother are sent to live with lifelong family friends in Shanghai, where Jane confronts long-buried family secrets, unfulfilled romance and, finally, expulsion from her beloved country. Now elderly, Jane has returned to China to reunite with the daughter she hasn’t seen in more than 60 years, and during a cross-country train ride to Beijing unravels the mystery of her parents’ murder. The story of its writing is as compelling as the book itself. FSO Jean Szymanski was serving as first secre- tary in the political section at Embassy Beijing in 1994 when she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. Szymanski and her daughter Jennifer Scheel Bushman, who both nurtured a passion for trav- el, reading and writing, decided to share their last months together writing. Hard Sleeper is the first of the two manuscripts they completed. Jean Szymanski died in 1998, and Jennifer, with the help of her stepfather former FSO Christopher Szymanski, pushed the book through to publication as a tribute to her mother’s courageous fight for life. The Trap: An International Thriller Fritz Galt, Sigma Books, 2003, $10.95, paperback, 212 pages. A fast-paced thriller that hops fromCentral Asia to the Middle East to Europe and the U.S., this new novel by F O C U S N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 27 2000 N. 14th Street ■ Suite 500 Arlington, VA 22201 Telephone (703) 797-3259 Fax (703) 524-7559 Tollfree (800) 424-9500