As a rebellious teenager, Yvonne Grayling burnt her grandmother Lana’s house to the ground. Five years later, and still wracked with guilt, Yvonne goes to London to replace the only irreplaceable item lost in the fire: a rubbing of a brass gravestone given to Lana during World War II by her first love. That quest will uncover long-buried secrets from her family’s past.

In “Zebras In London,” Yvonne’s quest to make things right evolves into an effort to reunite her grandmother with that lover, forty years after they last saw each other. But reconnecting them means restoring the other broken families entangled with her own.

At the book’s emotional core are the bonds Yvonne forms with a colorful cast of British and American women, as she discovers that you can’t make everyone’s problems right, and that sometimes you can’t avoid choosing sides.

Erik’s note: I love this so novel and these characters so much. I have probably not put any more time and energy into a single work than I have with Zebras in London. I published it under a pen name as an experiment to see if I could build a readership for something outside my core books of nonprofit manuals and sci-fi books. I’m happy to say that I’ve written something that readers have responded to. I’m putting it now, simply because my experiment was over and I’m happy to “claim” the work and share it with my readers.