During the years when I was in middle school and high school, my family lived in a subdivision outside a small town in a semi-rural area of Louisiana north of Lake Pontchartrain. This sleepy subdivision was not heavily populated and there was very little traffic. Little of note happened there, except perhaps for the occasional adulterous affair and minor acts of teenage vandalism, all likely arising out of boredom.

One Saturday during the summer, many years ago, I left my little condo in Beacon Hill to pick something up at a convenience store located at the bottom of the hill. It wasn’t late, maybe 8:30 or 9:00, but it was already dark. On my way back up the hill, I noticed a man standing in the doorway of the laundromat located on the corner of the block where my home was.

Parallel Lives is an adventure story, a romance, a tragedy with comic relief, and a modern retelling of the epic of the Trojan War. Its characters are richly developed and memorable, and their varied personalities and disparate responses to the challenges of life serve to advance the plot of Parallel Lives.

Dragons! The word immediately captures the imagination and conjures in our mind’s eye powerful, ruthless, fire-breathing, winged mythical beasts likely to leave a broad swath of destruction in their wake. Dragons have recently become quite popular, thanks to Harry Potter and Game of Thrones. Dragons play a role in the novel “Parallel Lives” as well.

When Alexander Eastgard, the protagonist of Parallel Lives, is faced with a difficult, stressful, emotional situation, he experiences unusual sensations that may influence his behavior.

Virtues of War, by Steven Pressfield, master of the historical novel, is a literary tour de force.