Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Local author publishes Waverly Hills novel

Released just in time for Halloween, James Markert’s The Requiem Rose: A Waverly Hills Story, is now available in all local bookstores and online at www.butlerbooks.com. Louisville’s September 25th Courier-Journal listed it as the week’s #1 top-selling book, and Markert has already heard from Waverly fans in France, New Zealand and Germany.

The Requiem Rose is Markert’s first work of fiction inspired by Waverly Hills, the famously haunted tuberculosis sanatorium in Southwest Louisville. The novel is set in the winter of 1929, at the height of the TB epidemic, and Markert weaves a story his New York editor calls: “Shawshank Redemption meets Amadeus.” Readers will also find themselves at Louisville’s historic Seelbach Hotel with the gangster Al Capone.

In The Requiem Rose, Wolfgang Pike, a doctor at Waverly Hills with a passion for classical music, forms an orchestra of dying patients – hoping to heal their souls – and in the process befriends a mysterious new patient who changes his life forever. But the past is never completely buried at Waverly. Was it fate or coincidence that brought them all together on the wooded hillside?


“…a must-read for any fan of Louisville history and a true pleasure for lovers of classical music…a richly melodic tale of redemption in the unlikeliest of places and times.”
Jason Weinberger, resident conductor, The Louisville Orchestra


James Markert is a graduate of the University of Louisville and DeSales High School. He lives in Louisville with his wife and two children. He is also a USPTA certified tennis professional at Louisville Tennis Club and Blairwood. He is currently working on a new Louisville-based novel and is in talks with a local producer/director about writing a television show that takes place at Waverly Hills in the 1920s—Deadwood meets Lost meets ER. He is also developing a screenplay for a tennis comedy with the same producer called Tan Lines and Tennis Balls. Learn more at www.jamesmarkertbooks.com

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