As in most of my writing, I don’t know how Tender Shadows began. Writing for me is a bit like breathing, I just do it.

I seem to remember questioning our throw-away society: how we throw away more than plastic bottles and last year’s iPads. Politicians ride a crest of popularity, then fade. Celebrities become our idols until some scandal does them in. Sometimes we throw away families.

The characters in Tender Shadows differ in background and purpose and choices. They mirror society in the early twenty-first century. They include the digitally adept and the digitally challenged, the athletic and those who struggle to keep off extra pounds, the confident and the searchers.

Beth, staring at middle age in a few years time, hopes to grab what she can from a life first of loss and then of aimless wandering. Joe, widowed, doesn’t want any other woman competing with memories of his beloved wife. Joe’s daughter, Annie, recovers from a past mistake—only was it a mistake? David, a young Palestinian-American, ignores his growing affection for Annie because he’s not worthy of tenderness after what he did in Iraq.

Thrown together at a U.S. embassy in what is supposed to be a peaceful assignment in a country friendly to the United States, they creep toward community. They share but constantly bump up against barriers which impede that sharing.

They watch increasing signs that not all citizens of this prosperous Gulf nation are pleased with their young ruler’s American ideas. Many fear the erosion of traditional values. The Americans wonder how threatened are their own values.