Overview

South African born and raised Hollywood screenwriter Helena Kriel is researching the ancient text the Kama Sutra for a movie she's writing. At the same time, she is travelling to India to meet with sages and find answers to the universal challenges of sex and love. While searching for love in her doomed relationships, little does she know she will find her answers in caring for her dying brother, Evan, in South Africa. Set in the mid-1990s, South Africa is just emerging from the darkness of apartheid and bursting with vibrant chaos. The story zooms in on an intense year in the narrator's life. It centres around the lively and eccentric South African Kriel family: Maya, the combative but inspired mother; Lexi, the sister recently returned from living in a temple in India; Ross, the younger brother diving with sharks; and Helena, the narrator, herself on a journey to understand love and death. At the heart of the story is Evan, her terminally ill 30-year-old gay brother, who has been keeping his illness a shameful secret. Conscious, sensitive, terrified and trying to hang onto sanity as his world changes, Evan becomes paralysed then finally goes blind as death draws ever closer. But it is Evan who leads the family through the fire. In living through her brother's fight to stay alive, the narrator finds herself at the heart of a savage story, one she would not have chosen. How could she know when she set out to India to find ancient solutions to the modern problems of our age that her brother's approaching death would be her greatest teacher? How could she imagine that dying brings everything to life? The Year of Facing Fire is an astoundingly written memoir by one of South Africa's finest writers. It traverses universal themes including love, death and sex, and finds value in the ordinary and great beauty in the uncertain.

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9781928420477

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Helena Kriel is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter who spends her time between Los Angeles and South Africa. Before heading to America, she worked as a playwright in South Africa, penning Pigs on Passion, Arachnid and I Can't Wait to Tie You to the Sofa. She was nominated as playwright of the year and also wrote extensively for television. Winning a Steven Spielberg award set her up to be an `A-List' writer in Hollywood, with produced screenplays to her credit. As a seeker of truth, fun and freedom, she has journeyed to Mexico, through Africa and has travelled around India with barefoot monks, meditated in caves, circumambulated holy mountains on full moon hikes and stayed in $1-a-night rooms with no sheets. Inspired by people and their wisdom, she looks for truth from her Uber drivers, her students and the sages who have given up all comfort to be really alive. She teaches screenwriting for Spalding University's MFA in Writing Program and takes writers and seekers on creative journeys into India. She loves nothing more than drinking chai in an Indian marketplace, way off the beaten track, surrounded by chaos and buffaloes. Deeply committed to animals, she is the founder and president of Baby Rhino Rescue, an international non-profit dedicated to saving the rhino from extinction. She counts herself luckiest when she has mud on her boots and a rhino for company.

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