Diabetes in Fiction

Something is wrong with Liam. He collapses during soccer practice, he can’t stay awake in class, and he’s starting to see a ghostly white fox that disappears into smoke. His parents and teachers accuse him of being lazy and staying up too late, but he knows it’s something worse. No one believes him except for Alaina, a friend and self-proclaimed expert in fantasy and fairy tales. She’s seen this sort of thing before and believes Liam has been cursed with a powerful sleeping spell. Her journal is full of possible ways to break a curse. Liam is skeptical, but with his normal life slipping further away, he agrees to try her potential cures.   As they search for answers in stories, Alaina shares that she also is dealing with something no one else can see: type 1 diabetes. It rears its head like an invisible dragon, and she carries her medical equipment as a knight’s lance and dragon-scale shield to battle it.  As Liam’s mystery illness worsens, he will need Alaina’s friendship—and perhaps a bit of fairy magic—to find a way to understand the truth of what is happening and regain the pieces of himself that are lost.

In outward form, NUMBER9DREAM is a Dickensian coming-of-age journey: Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out on his own by his sister’s death and his mother’s breakdown, comes to Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this strange, awesome city, he trips over and crosses—through a hidden destiny or just monstrously bad luck—a number of its secret power centers. Suddenly, the riddle of his father’s identity becomes just one of the increasingly urgent questions Eiji must answer. Why is the line between the world of his experiences and the world of his dreams so blurry? Why do so many horrible things keep happening to him? What is it about the number 9? To answer these questions, and ultimately to come to terms with his inheritance, Eiji must somehow acquire an insight into the workings of history and fate that would be rare in anyone, much less in a boy from out of town with a price on his head and less than the cost of a Beatles disc to his name.

Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: a sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as ‘the radio people,’ Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life. For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born. A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.