Books

Hear Karen's radio interview with Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, aired on WRFL, Lexington, KY.

Read an interview with Karen by WOW-Women on Writing.
Find out what book reviewer and blogger Renee Roberson leaned from The Woman of La Mancha.
A blog post, "A Novel Idea" What Comes Next" by Karen Mann on All Things Audrey
Review of The Woman of La Mancha on The New Book Review Blogspot

The Woman of La Mancha

Sample of Prologue and Chapter 1

Karen Mann compels us not to read but to live her novel. In The Woman of La Mancha, Mann immediately transports us across centuries to Spain, where we find ourselves in the body of a child who wakes up in a peasant's cart and has no idea who she is.

We grow with her and feel the inevitable stirrings of body and mind. To what extent, she questions, are the rules and prohibitions of church and state to be cherished or flouted? Where does one find the strength to overcome trauma and begin again? And what of love and kindness and their dark twins, hatred and cruelty?

This is a book about courage in both an extraordinary young woman and an extraordinary young man. Their lives will awaken your senses and engage your heart and mind. You won't want to leave their world, and you won’t want for this novel to end.

-Sena Jeter Naslund, editor, publisher, and bestselling author of Ahab's Wife
and most recently The Fountain of St. James Court Or,
Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman

see more praise for The Woman of La Mancha

The Saved Man, Book I

Four young men find themselves immortal in the first century A.D., the time of the Emperors Augustine, Nero, and Caligula; of Jesus; of the fall of the Jewish Temple; and of the end of Pompeii. Each man loves a woman beyond reason. What will happen as they realize their lovers will die and they will not?

Join Daniel Lockheart in the 21st century, as he unravels the 2,000-year-old story of Lucas, Alexander, Justus, and Mattius.

Excerpt from book:

Beginning his interview, Daniel clicked on the recorder. He said, “Talk about superpowers.”

In his soft and mysterious baritone voice, Alexander answered, “I don’t think I do anything that anyone could not do. We each have skills, probably overdeveloped skills.” He listed some: “Lucas has keen hearing. Matt can follow a scent better than a lion. Justus can talk eloquently, though not always honestly. I can see great distances in time and space. Maybe I remember the past better than any of them

Daniel was beginning to get an overall picture—the essence of the two thousand years could be told by the telling of a half dozen main stories, like when Alexander had been the legendary King Arthur, or when Lucas fought with Charlemagne, or when Justus was a critical bishop at the Council of Nicea, or when they were pirates in the late eighteenth century.

For each Saved Man, life was different than, yet similar to, other souls’ lives in that the men had to reestablish themselves into a new life every thirty or forty years while other souls occupied a different body with each birth, until death. Then repeated the cycle in a new body. Souls could come back as male or female. As a Saved Man, Lucas was destined to always be male, always be in a twenty-six-year-old body, no matter what age others thought him to be. In regard to learning the full smorgasbord of life’s lessons, they were hamstrung compared to other souls.