They could not have been more different: a black television host and a white supremacist in prison, and the death they share in common.
Velvet Lafonn, successful talk show host, lives in endless fear that the world will find out her terrible secret. Dale Atkins, delinquent turned white supremacist, holds the key to Velvet’s shocking past, as well as her salvation.
A novel for our times, Leave Love Behind examines the role of forgiveness, especially the seemingly unforgiveable. Characters are forced to question everything they ever thought was true. Leave Love Behind examines our interconnectedness, true redemption, and ultimately what it means to be good.
I wrote and am now introducing Leave Love Behind as a means to promote forgiveness, goodness, and of course, entertainment—and also to encourage reading and writing.
Reading and writing are important for several reasons: One is that in today’s world where the average sentence length in bestsellers has shrunk by a third since the 1930s, and where readership/reading has declined considerably (40% of Britons had not read or listened to any books in 2024) reading literature is important, if not urgent. Why? Because it is tied to intelligent decision-making. We have only to look at politics to see the dumbing down of America, and I believe ignorance, especially combined with arrogance, is our biggest threat.
The main theme of this book is the power of forgiveness, and so perhaps more importantly, I find that today’s world is a world where forgiveness is needed more than ever to bridge divides not only between political parties but perhaps also between races, generations, sexes, or with anyone who we perceive of as different from us, including animals, who are so often exploited.
The title is not pessimistic but rather taken from one of the characters who says, when we leave this earth what matters is the love that we will have left behind.
While this novel is about human interactions and not animals (my usual) I still donate 100% of profits back to the animals and some environmental organizations as well. There are of course many great causes out there, but we cannot donate to them all. Or I cannot. So, I limit my charities to focusing on alleviating suffering for the voiceless, specifically factory-farmed animals and the dangerous, unethical use of animals in testing. I do not believe that man can ultimately achieve peace when perpetuating the large-scale suffering of billions of animals. Or of humans. For charities supported www.kaypfaltz.com/Missionstatement.
Leave Love Behind was written as an intellectual exercise to write from two different narrative points of view as well as from two different sexes and two different races.