Alone in the Fortress

Set in the frenzied dot.com climate of Silicon Valley in the late 90's, this compelling novel tells a contemporary love story that is at once unashamedly passionate and completely realistic. Out of the material of everyday life - two single parents rebuilding their lives, a ruthlessly ambitious entrepreneur, a father's concern for his disabled son, a mother's dreams for her children - Joseph Wurtenbaugh has constructed an astonishingly vivid and compulsively readable saga about three lives on a collision course. The tension in the drama grows relentlessly, from its apparently innocent beginning in a chance encounter in connection with a children's playgroup, through the furious pace of an Internet start-up, to a shattering climax in a small suburban house. It is never less than grippingly intense, and it is always absolutely believable.

Above all, Alone in the Fortress is the oldest kind of love story - a book about the force that rules the universe, that changes the lives of everyone it touches. Some call it chemistry. The wiser call it destiny. Its appearance can be as sudden, as wonderful, and as devastating in the lives of the middle-aged as it can in the lives of the very young.