How does a soul preserve the treasures of childhood in a nation of terror? How does a woman choose her path in a revolution, yet never forget her primal friendship with herself? Tessa Bridal's The Tree of Red Stars begins with autobiographical landscape and reaches into fiction and history to answer these questions. Reading her remembered Uruguay, I rediscover my own childhood journey, and adult imperatives. The modern world needs this kind of remembering, with its claws and its ribbons.
—(Kim Stafford, author of Having Everything Right)

This is a story that must be told, and Tessa Bridal recounts it with clarity, compassion and courage. Deposited in our hearts, the story makes us witnesses, holds us all accountable, in the way that knowing does.
—(Sandra Benítez, author of A Place Where the Sea Remembers)

Praise for The Last Ship:

"Nevil Shute wrote a moving book, On the Beach, about the aftermath of a nuclear war... Now William Brinkley has used the same premise to tell and even more fascinating tale."
–Vermont Royster, The Wall Street Journal   “An extraoridincary novel of men at war, a superb portrtait of naval command, The Last Ship is a powerful and exciting novel you will not want to miss.” –Anthony Hyde, author of The Red Fox, The Washington Post "Beautifully written...as if the narrator has set himself the task of preserving the language,of writing it down lest it be lost forever... Brinkley's plot contains a series of unexpected reversals and the tale's conclusion is unforgettably intense… The Last Ship is a magnificent book.” –John R. Alden, Cleveland Plain Dealer   “William Brinkley writes in expert detail about life on the sea… Readers will be engaged by this ambitious tale, which draws on the legacies of Melville and Conrad but is full of its own nuclear-age quandaries and horrors.” –Andrew Postman, The New York Times Book Review    “Brinkley’s tale has humanity, thoughtfulness and one inspired complication: women.”  –Donald Morrison, Time