"The Strongest Love..."

"THE STRONGEST LOVE..." has as its tag line the observation of W. Somerset Maugham that "The love that is the strongest is the love that is not returned." Following the format of Emile Zola's "For a Night of Love" its author T. Lawrence Harrison begins with the title novella: The powerful and provocative story of a Catholic priest whose life is turned upside down when he chances to meet an aging and dying African-American porn actress and prostitute, who is raising her teen son, while waiting to catch a flight at an airport terminal. Though he risks his life and is willing to sacrifice his vocation for the shallow - strangely heroic - prostitute, she "will not settle" for his love and hopes in vain for a miracle that will heal her body and erase her past.
The second novella is "ADAM'S PEAK" and is a "Maugham-like" tale of unending love heavily influenced by T. Lawrence Harrison's own life journey. It is the story of a man of many achievements, but no real success, other than his marriage to a beautiful young woman from the Island of Sri Lanka thirty plus years earlier. When she dies, suddenly and unexpectedly, from a rare and aggressive uterine cancer he sets out to make the journey to the top of Adam's Peak to fulfill a promise he made to her years earlier.

The third and final novella is "ALL BOXED IN" and is the moving story of a young, gay veteran of the War in Afghanistan, who returns to his home in conservative Orange County, California a national hero - only to quickly find himself "all boxed in with no where to escape" by the expectations of his wealthy family and its powerful circle-of-friends.