THE FIVE family sagas, written with passion and insight, offer a contemporary novelist’s answer to Freud’s famous question: “What do women want?”
 

Throughout the developing and Western world, we women want justice, love, equality, happiness and lives of integrity and wishes fulfilled. That’s all?  Do they—do we?—get it? My stories tell the tales.
 

The women whose fictional stories I’ve shared frankly may not always get what they—and we—want. But what these characters and we readers do get are fascinating lives of adventure and passion; love in many forms; a role in determining some of the great questions of our time, and—frankly—wonderful and delightful stories that illuminate our worlds and make us happier to be alive. 
 

These five novels all rest soundly on history and are fictional stories modeled on the lives of real people—especially women of the developing world—and aim to tell deep, deeper, deepest truths behind headlines. Their blood and guts are reflections of real human suffering.  So are their heartfelt emotions of love, shame, hate, healing, and forgiveness, which lie at the birth of history.
 

Three are set in the Mideast, in Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. Two are in the eastern Mediterranean—Greece and Cyprus. Some of the characters are American or British. But what sets these books apart is their emphasis on women’s truths, especially the daily lives of women who may live in poverty, who endure family and societal oppression, and yet may become heroes. The men they love—their partners, sons, brothers, fathers, friends and neighbors—are often dreams come true.
 

I used my background as a journalist, foreign correspondent, and graduate student in politics and international affairs to probe and understand issues that I believe matter. In addition, as an anthropologist might do primary research, I lived and worked in villages and urban settings throughout the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean and also researched academic articles (especially village studies) which I found deeply fascinating.
 

Then I wrote what I believe are compelling stories which capture real lives of real people.
 

I wrote this series of stand-alone novels fifty years ago, and when I reread them this year prior to these digital publications, I wondered if they would withstand the test of time. And I thought they did! As a writer now in my late seventies, I marvel at how passionate a writer I was in my twenties!  I can’t write like that anymore. My voice as a writer now is more reflective, perhaps more gentle and caressive, certainly more forgiving, yet maybe sadder.
 

But once I wrote, and lived, like the women heroes whose stories I tell. How grateful I am to have lived in a time where women have dared to do so much and succeeded with such grace and vim and vigor.

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These stories are really your stories. About you and me. And our sisters in spirit.

~ Laurie Devine