The New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author James Michael Pratt brings you to a small, coastal Californian town and delivers a poignant and unforgettable novel woven between the Vietnam War and the present day.... Jack Santos never had a father - or so he believed. All his life, he was told his father was killed in the Vietnam War. Jack was raised by his mother alone, and all his life he was searching for something he couldn't name. A twist of fate changes everything he thought he knew, however. He discovers his father isn't dead after all and that for the past decades he has been suspended between life and death; between dreaming and waking. Jack is hungry for everything he can find out about this father, Levi Harper. And the only link he has to the past is through Levi's journals. It is through these journals that Jack discovers who his father really is: from a small boy in Paradise Bay, California, to an eager young man going off to Vietnam, to a young husband who desperately wants a future for his wife, Levi Harper reveals his loves, dreams, hopes...and secrets. Can Jack discover the truth about his own life? And can he find the love that will always bring him back to Paradise Bay? For anyone who came of age in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s, Paradise Bay is a story that will show you the true meaning of love, and will take you home again. Pratt has a knack for bringing to life stories about love and war, and both are entwined here. Jack Santos always wished he knew his father, but now that Jack knows he is alive, he can't communicate with him. Levi Harper, a "piano man" like his son, suffered a head wound while serving in Vietnam and fell into a coma. Thirty years later he regains consciousness and is amazed to be an old man instead of a young soldier on his last mission before marrying his childhood sweetheart, Jenna, who is not Jack's mother, but Levi only has four years before he goes under again. Fortunately, he leaves Jack the journals he wrote while coping with his traumatic awakening. Soon Jack is immersed in his father's life, beginning with his childhood and moving through his reluctant but heroic service during the Vietnam War, his love for music, and his love for Jenna, a passion that kept him from marrying Jack's mother. Ultimately, Jack learns as much about himself as about his father. Patty Engelmann Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “A tender tearjerker, this latest read craftily joins the past and the present in a place where they can exist in perfect harmony.” ― RT Book Reviews James Michael Pratt is the author of several books, including the bestselling novels Paradise Bay, Ticket Home , and The Lighthouse Keeper . He lives along the Wasatch mountain range in Utah. Paradise Bay By James Michael Pratt St. Martin's Press Copyright © 2002 James Michael Pratt All right reserved. ISBN: 9780312266349   1 OVERTURE Present Day, Veteran’s Hospital, Los Angeles J ACK SANTOS HAD LONGED FOR THIS DAY HIS ENTIRE LIFE. He had always carried with him the childhood fantasy of having a dad. He had been told his father was dead. Killed in Vietnam. But here he was, standing at the hospital room door of a man in his fifties, a man in a catatonic stupor, dead to the world but alive somewhere deep inside.He had been informed only recently of his relationship by an attorney for the sleeping man’s estate. The story was as long as the time the man had been away from the world of the living. It was a thirty-year-old tale of his father’s loss of consciousness during a battle in Vietnam, then an amazing awakening that lasted over four years.The wounded man, Levi Harper, awoke as innocent as a child. Full of wonder, and the expectation that he had only been out for months at best, he found his musical talent exceeded what it had been when he left civilian life behind for the Marines in 1966.He gradually regained his memory, and the childhood love of his life. Forty-eight months after his amazing awakening in 1998, tragedy knocked once more. The music man from a small coastal fishing town in California was losing his reason to live. The gravity of his wife’s failing health due to a potentially deadly disease created more stress than he could physically handle.Just weeks before this day, he fell to a stroke. But not before he hired an investigator to search for the son lost to him so many years before.Jack wanted to believe. He wanted to embrace what the attorney in Los Angeles and his new uncle, Jeffrey Harper, had said.He took a deep breath and summoned the strength to confront the sleeping man, look at his face, see if he could find himself in the slumbering countenance. Releasing the air from his lungs, he allowed the stressfulness of the moment to remain outside the room. He was determined to be open to whatever this visit would hold for him and his future.He quietly stepped inside. A nurse busily attended Levi Harper. Her back to him, she hadn’t