The Kingdom of Heaven has been downsized to a single city. And to save overcrowding, God has a new chosen race and set of entry qualifications.

In the modern hereafter only good Americans go to Paris when they die!

But not even a divinely ordered bureaucracy is infallible and five not-so-good Americans find themselves posthumously thrown together and trapped in a surreal limbo:

Randy 1900s marine Louis Forster; Maggie Thompson, an over-sexed 1930s fan dancer; neurotic 1940s New York intellectual Seymour Stein; Helen Ricchi, the mysterious and bookish wallflower suspected of foul play after her husband's disappearance in the 1950s; modern-day Las Vegas boor, truck driver Max Pilsudski.

And the ill-assorted desperate departed will stop at nothing in a seemingly impossible quest to return to the land of the living and repair flawed lives and fractured loves.

Heaven and an Orwellian Hell share a fragile frontier in Howard Waldman's masterfully woven novel of profound humanity and lethally-honed humor.

Excerpt

What the critics are saying about Howard Waldman …

The acerbic wit and sustained irony of a Woody Allen or a Kurt Vonnegut. David Gardiner. Gold Dust Magazine.

This is a man in superb control of his material, a man who knows his characters inside out and who can bring them across to us with a sense of reality that is quite beautiful. He has a wicked turn of phrase that can bring the reader from a smile to a laugh. Chris Williams. Tregolwyn Book Reviews

This book is destined for greatness and I would not be at all surprised to see the name Howard Waldman on the bestseller list. Alastair Rosie. eBook Reviews Weekly

(Published 2008)

In an age of plummeting morals and urban chaos verging on civil war, businessman Edmond Lorz makes a precarious living by removing obscene graffiti from underground railway advertising hoardings.

It's during a recruitment aptitude test for extra porn-purging staff that a terrorist bomb rips through Ideal Poster's grubby headquarters, leaving Lorz and one candidate - the seventh - fighting for life in hospital.

Lorz recovers completely, but the strikingly handsome young job-seeker wakens from his coma a blank-faced, unspeaking automaton with total amnesia and a blind obsession with his new employer's clean-up campaign.

Adopted by Lorz and his wildly unpredictable secretary, Dorothea - each driven by pity, love and stark fear - the mysterious Seventh Candidate wages a private and manic war on disorder in a subterranean maze of tunnels beneath a city gone mad.

Howard Waldman's latest novel, set against a backdrop of social disintegration that's almost too close for comfort, swings from lunatic hilarity to heartrending tragedy … and often the reader may struggle to tell the difference in a story with more twists and turns than a subway map.

Read an excerpt here

(Published 2007)

Harvey promises better things to his penniless assistant, Jerry Weizman: a way to slow down time and project himself back to loved ones … above all back to Rachel Rosen, dead in mysterious circumstances half a century earlier, and loved by both men in their youth.

Jerry is sucked into Harvey's obsession and visits the past. But how much of their visions are subjective distortions brought on by drugs, alcohol, yearning or growing mental unbalance?

And why has Harvey hired Jerry after decades of estrangement following Rachel's death? Is it to vengefully expose him to the time machine's lethal rays … the same radiation that is killing its inventor?

Read an excerpt here

(Published 2006)

Harry Grossman sees his world through the viewfinder of a battered camera. And he photographs it all, from the peeling posters and graffiti on grubby city walls to the most intimate moments of his mysterious French sweetheart. He becomes a permanent guest at her family's ramshackle country cottage, thirty miles and a century away from modern Paris. Harry, the New York outsider, calls it paradise and photographs the Model T Ford on the roof, the archaic well and scythe, the top-secret wild mushroom spots, and the reluctant Lauriers themselves.

They assume that outsider Harry will soon be a member of the family, but the strange photographer with his growing mountain of prints and negatives and imperfect French is not a man for snap decisions. Aren't things already perfect in this paradise? Someone once said, though, that the only paradises are lost paradises.

Back There is a touching and powerfully nostalgic transatlantic love story, sometimes verging on the comic, sometimes on the tragic. France and the French, too often caricatures of their own special reality, are presented with absolute authenticity.

With soft-focus subtlety, Howard Waldman shows that Europe and America are two continents divided by a perceived common culture of art and love - and that light-years separate Paris and Manhattan and the lives and values of the Lauriers and the Grossmans.

Read an excerpt here

(Published 2005)