THE HUMMINGBIRD'S CAGE

A cross between The Lovely Bones and Touched by an Angel, The Hummingbird's Cage tells the story of a woman living in New Mexico who marries a handsome policeman and lives to regret it. Her husband Jim is a pathological bully who terrorizes Joanna and her six-year-old daughter with impunity because of his uniform.

When Joanna finally gets up the courage to flee, a violent chase ensues, and Joanna finds herself and young Laurel recovering in a strangely luminous and touchingly old-fashioned small town that seems to exist outside time. As Joanna befriends a community of quirky residents from different historical eras she slowly realizes that she has to find the courage to struggle back to the real world and face her demons. Debut author Tamara Dietrich, a Virginia-based award-winning journalist, brings insight and imagination to this tale of otherworldly redemption. TAMARA DIETRICH has been a news columnist for the Daily Press since 2003. In a career spanning 23 years, she has won numerous journalism awards for writing news, features and columns. She has been a reporter, features writer, features editor, Sunday editor and columnist at daily papers in New Mexico, New York and Arizona. Born in Germany and raised in western Maryland, she holds a bachelor of arts in English/creative writing from the University of New Mexico. The Hummingbird's Cage is her debut novel.