Keith Maillard

John Dupre, a junior at West Virginia University, is an honors student dressed up as a beatnik cowboy, the folk-singing "resident outsider" before nonconformity became a youth uniform.

"The year is 1969, and young Jimmy Koprowski returns from his stint in the air force to Raysburg, his blue-collar Polish-American hometown where nothing much happens beyond working at the steel mill, going to Mass, and getting drunk at the local PAC. Jimmy's efforts at rebuilding his life result in sleeping off hangovers in his parents' attic and drifting into a destructive affair with a married woman.". "But things change when his younger sister, Linda, decides to start an all-girl polka band and Jimmy falls for the bands star clarinetist, Janice, whose young life is haunted by tragic events that happened before she was born. The threads of Jimmy's family life, the legacy of WWII Poland, and the healing power of music, language, and tradition all begin to converge."--BOOK JACKET.

Larry Cameron is a veteran of hazard zones. As a native of Raysburg, West Virginia, a flood plain development on the Ohio River, he grew up in one; as a geography student who researched hazard zones on the Ohio River, he became an expert on them; and now, in the throes of mid-life, Larry is facing another hazard zone - the unfinished business of his past. After a long, self-imposed absence, Larry returns to Raysburg to care for his ailing mother. As he rediscovers his home town, memories of his troubled childhood surface and he is forced to come to terms with the people and events that shaped his adult life - the father he never knew, the alcoholic stepfather who raised him, and the reckless, doomed stepbrother who was his closest companion.

Motet is an expert unraveling of the threads of an unsolved murder that took place in the underworld of the sixties, and a powerful tale of evil and temptation. But at the heart of Motet is a love story, a tale of a music professor whose life is thrown into confusion by his new and passionate lover - and the unexpected appearance of her ex-husband. Motet is a hypnotic, intense read. Behind each word, each sentence, you can feel the blood coursing, the flesh breathing and the sinews tensing ... What's most impressive about Maillard is that he writes a damn good story. — The Toronto Star

"Leslie is a young woman whose life has been set adrift since her career as a competitive swimmer ended. Alan is a gentle young hairstylist trapped achingly between a male body and female psyche. His transformation into Ellen is touchingly told - and it is utterly compelling. And then there's Jeanie, Alan's young niece, who battles her own demons. Hovering at the periphery of these lives in transition is the healing presence of Mildred Mackenzie, a strange older woman whose mystical understanding of mind and body brings these characters together and unleashes the power within them all."--BOOK JACKET.

"Czech runner Emil Zátopek, a factory worker who, despite an initial contempt for athletics as a young man, is forced to participate in a footrace and soon develops a curious passion for the physical limits he discovers as a long distance runner. Zátopek's determination and uniquely brutal training regime lead him to break numerous world records, culminating in an unparalleled win of three gold medals at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. Despite being heralded as a national hero and adored around the world for his astonishing physical accomplishments, Zátopek becomes a victim of the controlling communist regime that once supported him"--Jacket.