Book 1: The Qaraq
Where the qaraqis grapple with belief in their past life visions.
“He plays with an amazing musical instrument … creating battles and intrigue, lurid sex orgies, spies and betrayers … the list of vistas generated one after the other as one turns the pages, defies description!”
Iva Kenaz, author, The Goddess Within
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Sahara Fleming experiences disturbing visions. A lifetime as a vengeful Red Isle Goddess. An uncomfortably intimate view into a 4th Century Persian orgy. A piece of Vaalbara, the planet’s oldest supercontinent.
Sahara dismisses her storms as stress. She’s four months pregnant and married to Amar Rash, an emotionally aggressive stockbroker unwilling to be a father. But when her mysterious neighbors reveal secrets about her visions, she realizes their true meaning.
Sahara and her neighbors are a qaraq, a group of intertwined souls who come together lifetime after lifetime. Their past life relationships are as diverse as their present day personas. Invited to the group’s secretive meetings, Sahara hears a host of fascinating tales and discovers her stormy marriage goes back centuries.
As Sahara’s karmic knowledge grows, so does Amar’s jealousy. She must abandon the qaraq or risk losing her husband, her family, and her sanity.
Structured as a modern Arabian Nights, Stephen Weinstock’s 1001 challenges readers to journey on an ocean of infinitely imaginative stories.
You’re at the beginning of an epic journey with Book One of 1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles. Book 2 has launched and Book 3 will follow. My current edit of Book 5 wreaked havoc on the end of Book 4. And drafting an outline of Book 6 got me excited about Book 7! If you want to be part of the journey, sign up for The Maqaraqan. The huh? The 1001 series’ newsletter that comes with a free Reader’s Guide to help sort out the reincarnation stories.
Original cover of Book One, from a print by my son, Gabriel Weinstock.
We all have felt the intense but fleeting sensation of deja vu. My first idea for the book was a string of tiny chapters, fleeting fragments of past life stories. As the chapters accrued, the fragments formed a larger story that made sense.
But when I had the epiphany to structure the book like The Thousand and One Nights, I got greedy. I wanted 1001 chapters. I wanted each chapter to be a complete piece. I wanted fuller stories to accrue into a giant karmic history. Someone should have slapped me!
But I fell in love with the Nights and particularly the Scheherazade frame story. So my main characters became a modern Scheherazade and her King: Sahara Fleming and Amar Rash. They have marital problems, she has strange visions, and he calms down listening to them as stories. The rest is The Reincarnation Chronicles.
MORE TO EXPLORE:
I am delighted to share sample chapters with my readers!
The Qaraq: excerpt between Sahara and Amar.
To get a sense of the dynamic between Sahara and Amar, and how the book moves from present day to past life and back, here is an earlyish chapter excerpt. Sahara and Amar try to ease their tensions with a story of their happy past. A happy past buried deep, deep in Time.
Here’s an example of a past life story from Book One. The incarnation is a tree in a 19th Century town in New Jersey. The tree faces being cut down for the local mill and envisions the past, present, and future of the trees in the glen of the town.
LET’S CONNECT
Have a question about The Qaraq? Wanna share past life visions you’ve had? Have a suggestion about a character arc?