Exiles — Cary Groner

Suspenseful and thought-provoking, Exiles is an extraordinary debut in which East meets West at the point where lives hang in the balance.

Opening the door to a Nepal few Westerners have encountered, Exiles tells the haunting story of an American doctor and his teenage daughter caught in the midst of a civil war.

Fleeing the messy dissolution of his marriage, cardiologist Peter Scanlon decides to take a risk and move with his seventeen-year-old daughter to Kathmandu, where he will volunteer in a free health clinic. But once there, he finds that he failed to anticipate the hardships and dangers: austere living conditions; a chronic shortage of medical supplies; diseases he has never encountered before; the sexual trafficking of young girls; and political instability and an encroaching civil war. At the same time, his friendship and philosophical discussions with a Tibetan Buddhist lama challenge and invigorate Scanlon, and his contentious relationship with the Nepali nurse who works with him gives way to deeper feelings. His daughter, in the meantime, flourishes as she quickly adapts to the new culture and falls in love for the first time. But when Scanlon is summoned to the scene of an accident on Mt. Annapurna, their lives become a nightmare of violence and fear.

Set within an extreme landscape of both beauty and peril, Exiles takes the reader on a gripping adventure that asks profound questions about the nature of our beliefs -- and how far we are willing to go to defend them.