Welcome to my website!
I'm Sharon Rose Anderson, author of Jangala: A Wild Place In The Heart.

About the Author
Sharon Anderson has published short fiction in The Carolina Quarterly and Writ, The University of Toronto Quarterly. Her important, lifesaving work, Mitral Valve Prolapse: Benign Syndrome?, available online at e-reads.com and her website, www.angelfire.com/biz2/mvp/, has earned her many interviews and speaking engagements, most notably at The International Women’s Health Conference in Beijing, China.

About my latest book, Jangala: A Wild Place In The Heart

A famous author with a secret agenda holds writing workshops in a  hotel on the Vegas Strip.

A class of greedy, competitive students wanting to write blockbuster novels so they can make millions erupts in violence.

The star of the group is secretly kidnaped by the brooding class pariah. 

An innocent hike turns into a nightmare in the loneliest spot on earth.

A chain of unimaginable events in the wilderness shocks the class mystery writer into life.

"Jangala" is a Sanskrit word which means both jungle and desert or a wild place.

At the age of five, the narrator, Felicity, is whisked away from the grinding poverty of a native reservation when a rich man falls in love with her beautiful, prostitute mother. James MacKay, owner of a war materials company and recreational preacher, transports mother and daughter to his mansion in Toronto where he showers them with unbelievable luxuries. But the price is high. Tough morality lessons for Kore and her mother. When Kore becomes a Vietnam War activist and protest poet, her shaky fairy-tale world collapses. While studying for her Ph.D in English, Kore flees the academic world and her bomb and bullet making stepfather and hopelessly obedient mother. 

Reinventing herself as Kore Nekhebt, the heroine meets Carlton at a Toronto singles bar. He is a savvy intellectual with huge charm and a huge pocket book. A successful writer of image-building books, Carlton is fascinated with the beautiful, talented native girl. Kore follows her egocentric lover to Vegas where he holds writing workshops in the MGM hotel. Fifty to a hundred people attend Carlton's classes that often turn into therapy sessions. The students all fawn over Carlton as they are eager to learn the secret of writing blockbusters that make millions, like Koontz or King. Many students, sensing but never really knowing Kore is Carlton's lover, heap praise and flattery upon her to get closer to the source as they call him.  Except one, the silent, contemptuous Nev who wears ragged, torn clothing and black boots and lives in a seedy, run-down motel on the edge of the Strip.
 
Carlton loves to provoke conflict. He throws out story ideas and, through flattery, coerces his students to sit in the center of his circle and create an on-the-spot drama. Spontaneous invention, like spontaneous combustion, Carlton repeats makes a writer. He proposes a steamy lover's quarrel and chooses Kore and the moody outsider, Nev, to role play. When the pampered, cheeky intellectual spars with the tongue-tied, high-school drop-out, sparks fly. With great fun, Kore challenges Nev at every opportunity, ridiculing him to get him to talk, but he refuses to participate. However, when her barbs come too close to the truth and embarass him, he explodes in anger, and the skit erupts in violence. Nev is held down by members of the class. By sheer physical force, he is able to break away but not before he is slashed by a knife-wielding former mafia hit man who then vows to get Nev in a dark alley.

Carlton bans Nev and Kore from class. Kore seeks shelter in Nev's motel room. His embarrassment, after a failed attempt at lovemaking with the queen of the workshop, prompts Nev to ask Kore to go hiking with him in the Death Valley Mountains. He asks her to share the real world that he loves. In the wilderness, he will show her things she has never dreamed of and has never read about in any book. In revenge on Carlton, Kore agrees to go. She is inexorably drawn to Nev, as he is to her, in a love-hate relationship. In the desert, an unimaginable environment explodes. Nev's real home is a cave deep in the mountains where Kore discovers an arsenal of military weapons he has been stealing from his former military base. He confesses to her that he has just gotten back from Nam and has a few things to sort out in his head. A horrific series of events unfolds in which Nev forces Kore to engage in increasingly violent activities. He teaches her to shoot automatic weapons, plant IEDs and land mines and set up booby traps in his ongoing fantasy world of terrorist threats. When he finds out how good a shot Kore is and how tough she can be, he only pushes her to further, extreme limits 

To survive, Kore becomes an expert at these activities, and her captor leads her to believe she is to join him in a plot to blow up specific financial institutions and the government he hates. In this exhaustive journey through the mountains, Kore never knows whether she is the hunter or the hunted. Nev keeps her guessing as payback for her having ridiculed him in class in front of the other members and Carlton. At every step of the way, the little knowledge she gains about this man who fascinates her is literally blown away, and she must start again at zero, trying to figure him out. When the terrifying fantasy rocks to an explosive finale, the two face each other in a new way, and the reconstruction of their love can begin.