Wendy Grey Bücher

In 1959, Wendy Grey, a young district nurse, lives in one of the remotest corners of the world. Officially, she is employed as a health worker running a dispensary as part of the Anglican mission in Tongud in North Borneo. However, as the only medical practitioner in the region--apart from local witch doctors--she is obliged to carry out every procedure her patients require, or watch people die. And so Wendy finds herself diagnosing diseases, performing operations (acting as both anesthetist and surgeon), delivering babies, and extracting teeth. When news reaches her of patients too sick to come to the dispensary, she undergoes long and arduous journeys, often travelling for hundreds of miles through the jungle in a dug-out canoe to reach them. Back home, supporters are uplifted by Wendy's selfless, cheerful ministry, horrified by her accounts of close encounters with snakes and crocodiles, and stirred by her courage in the face of unimaginable challenges. Based on Wendy Grey's vividly detailed diaries, her many letters and the extensive newspaper coverage generated during her three-year mission, this is the story of a young district nurse who responds to a call for aid from Christians in one of the remotest corners of the world.

What If We Were Somewhere Else is the question everyone asks in these linked stories as they try to figure out how to move on from job losses, broken relationships, and fractured families. Following the employees of a nameless corporation and their loved ones, these stories examine the connections they forge and the choices they make as they try to make their lives mean something in the soulless, unforgiving hollowness of corporate life. Looking hard at the families to which we are born and the families we make, What If We Were Somewhere Else asks its own questions about what it means to work, love, and age against the uncertain backdrop of modern America.

"Melanie Henderson's life is a lie. The scandal of her birth and the identity of her true parents is kept from her family's small, conservative Colorado town. Not even she knows the truth: that her birth mother was just fourteen and unmarried to her father, a local boy who drowns when he tries to take a shortcut across an icy river. Thirty-five years later, in Denver, Melanie dabbles in affairs with married men while clinging to a corporate job that gives her life order even as her tenuous relationships fall apart. She still hasn't learned that the woman who raised her is actually her aunt - or that her birth mother visits her almost every day. This fiercely-guarded secret bonds the two most important women in her life, who hatched a plan to trade places and give Melanie a life unmarred by the shame of her birth. Yet, as a forest fire rages through the Rocky Mountains and a car accident shakes the family, Melanie finds herself at the center of an unraveling tangle of tragedy and heartbreak. If the Ice Had Held speaks with a natural lyricism, and presents a cast of characters who quietly struggle through complicated lives. Selected by Benjamin Percy as the grand prize winner of the 2017 SFWP Literary Awards Program"--