Linda Dahl began her career as a travel journalist and college teacher before turning to writing full time. An award-winning author, she has written groundbreaking books about women in jazz and women’s needs in recovery from addiction, as well as five works of fiction. She is currently at work on a screenplay and a new novel. She has two children, a cat, and too many plants. She lives in Riverdale in New York City.

When Lidia, a blocked Latinx artist in her sixties, goes on a group tour of Namyan, a fictional Southeast Asian country reopened to the world after a long dictatorship, she gets much more than the vacation she thinks she’s signed on for. Against a backdrop of pagodas and enigmatic customs, she and the disparate crew of eighteen Americans on the tour encounter one adventure after another—experiences that challenge their assumptions about their host country’s placid surface of beautiful pagodas and wandering Buddhist monks. Along the way, Lidia finds companionship and sexual pleasure with Haynes, a Black man seeking adventure—even danger—in Namyan. On a nighttime excursion among mysterious ancient buildings, they watch the nighttime sky. Lidia remarks that the stars look upside down – a metaphor for Namyan as a foreign place and for her. She enjoys being with Haynes but is conflicted. The final chapter reveals a secret, the source of her conflict, and her steps towards a new freedom.

An Upside-Down Sky’s cast of characters, including their Namyanese guide, mirrors America: straight, gay, gender-fluid, black, brown, white, progressive, conservative, artistic, repressed, old, young. Some of them accept Nanyam’s charming façade at face value, while others seek to understand the country’s brutal repression by the military and ongoing ethnic conflicts. And most, resistant as they might be to change, are transformed by their time there.

When Lidia, a blocked Latinx artist in her sixties, goes on a group tour of Namyan, a fictional Southeast Asian country reopened to the world after a long dictatorship, she gets much more than the vacation she thinks she’s signed on for. Against a backdrop of pagodas and enigmatic customs, she and the disparate crew of eighteen Americans on the tour encounter one adventure after another—experiences that challenge their assumptions about their host country’s placid surface of beautiful pagodas and wandering Buddhist monks. Along the way, Lidia finds companionship and sexual pleasure with Haynes, a Black man seeking adventure—even danger—in Namyan. On a nighttime excursion among mysterious ancient buildings, they watch the nighttime sky. Lidia remarks that the stars look upside down – a metaphor for Namyan as a foreign place and for her. She enjoys being with Haynes but is conflicted. The final chapter reveals a secret, the source of her conflict, and her steps towards a new freedom.

An Upside-Down Sky’s cast of characters, including their Namyanese guide, mirrors America: straight, gay, gender-fluid, black, brown, white, progressive, conservative, artistic, repressed, old, young. Some of them accept Nanyam’s charming façade at face value, while others seek to understand the country’s brutal repression by the military and ongoing ethnic conflicts. And most, resistant as they might be to change, are transformed by their time there.

When twenty-something artist Erica Mason moves from laid-back Mexico to Manhattan in the mid-1970s, she finds a hard-edged, decadent, and radically evolving art scene. Peppered with characters who could only come from the latter days of the “turn-on-and-drop-out” ’60s in then-crumbling New York (a spaced-out drummer who’s completely given up on using or making money, a radical feminist who glues animal furs to her paintings of vaginas, and icons in the making like Patti Smith), Erica’s New York is fast-moving, funny, and heartrending—just like the city itself. Ultimately, her rite of passage is not only a love affair with art, men, alcohol, drugs, and music in the swirl that was the downtown scene in a radically evolving era in New York, but also a resurrection from addiction and self-delusion. More than the study of a celebrated period of artistic expression, Cleans Up Nicely is the story of one gifted young woman’s path from self-destruction to a hard-won self-knowledge that opens up a whole new world for her—and helps her claim the self-respect that has long eluded her.

For fans of Anne Tyler and Jojo Moyes, a tartly compassionate and contemporary tale of sibling love and conflict, marital challenges, and what personal fulfillment looks like—or doesn’t—in middle age.

Mid-life: Its obligations and demands, its petty foibles and evasions. And sometimes, its crises. Dreams are deferred, shortcomings rationalized. Like favorite old clothes, petty misdemeanors may feel comfortable, but they’re not a good look.

The Talley siblings are planning a family beach vacation—all four of them together for the first time in years. They suspect it will be their last. And God knows they all need a vacation. But wait, is it really such a good idea? Corina, with her recently diagnosed Alzheimer’s, can hardly manage to get through a day without a debacle. Pete is a just-barely-walking catalog of medical calamities stemming from his longtime addictions. Becca is reeling from her teenage son’s latest misadventure. And then there is Kathy, the eldest. After firmly avoiding going back to Rincón Bay, the beach town just a few hours south of the Arizona–Mexico border that has haunted her since a college spring break trip three decades ago, she’s determined to go back and face her ghosts—though she might be better off facing the fact that her marriage is in serious trouble.

When the Talley siblings and their entourage (two spouses, added on at the last minute, and Corina’s Mexican housekeeper/caregiver) finally land in Rincón Bay, they all encounter unexpected consequences from the wounds inflicted by careless loving—but maybe, too, the seeds of healing and hope.