Some chapters of history feel almost too extraordinary to be real — and yet they are rarely told.

 

Some chapters of history feel almost too extraordinary to be real — and yet they are rarely told.

An American Slave in Barbary: The Odyssey of Winston Prescott Jones shines a light on a largely forgotten moment in early American history, when newly independent Americans found themselves captured and enslaved along the Barbary Coast. Blending historical adventure with philosophical depth, the novel asks big questions about freedom, identity, and what it meant to be American at a time when the nation itself was still an experiment.

Drawing inspiration from the epic tradition of Homer, this sweeping historical novel follows one man’s long and harrowing journey through captivity, power, loss and survival. At once action-packed and reflective, it explores how endurance is shaped not only by physical hardship, but by ideas — about liberty, self-rule, and the cost of believing in them. In today’s spotlight, we take a closer look at a novel that brings an overlooked history vividly to life.

✔️ Inspired by forgotten American history
✔️ A sweeping, Homeric-style adventure
✔️ Explores freedom, identity and survival
✔️ Richly atmospheric and action-packed
✔️ A powerful journey of endurance and redemption

Check out the blurb:

A Homeric American Novel 

An American Slave in Barbary: The Odyssey of Winston Prescott Jones is the story of a first-generation American student whose commercial ship is captured in the summer of 1801 by Moslem pirates. He spends the next sixteen years as a captive in Algiers. He rises to become a confidant to the Dey of Algiers, who is desperate to know what made the American shopkeepers and farmers believe they could defeat the British war machine, and how they intended to rule themselves.

In the genre created by Homer, it is a tale of suffering, sin, and redemption, and a young man's epic journey to regain his freedom.

An American Slave in Barbary: The Odyssey of Winston Prescott Jones is available now in Kindle, paperback and hardback. If you’re drawn to immersive historical fiction, epic journeys, and forgotten chapters of history brought vividly to life, this is a book not to be missed. You can buy it HERE.

Larry Kelley's life was utterly changed by 9/11. On the day after the attacks, on his way to work, he was struck by the sudden realization that World War III had commenced. Like most Americans he desperately wanted to find out who were these people who attacked us, what could ordinary citizens do to join the battle and how can those plotting to kill us in future attacks be defeated.

Mr. Kelley has written scores of columns on the dangers of western complacency. In his tenure as a political commentary writer, he has made a significant impact. His feature articles have appeared in the Piedmont Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Human Events, and Townhall Magazine. Two of his articles were featured on the cover of Townhall Magazine. He wrote an Op-ed which appeared in the liberal San Francisco Chronicle a month before Obama was inaugurated entitled, A Second New Deal is a Recipe for Disaster. Two and half years later, on August 6, 2011, the Chronicle ran the front-page headline--S&P Downgrades U.S. Credit Rating.

The result of ten years of research, his book, Lessons from Fallen Civilizations, contains the answers the above questions he asked in the wake of 9/11. His book has already received critical praise as a saga which begins on the plane of Marathon in 490 BC and whose main character is Western Civilization.

Larry Kelley is a writer and a contract negotiator in the construction industry and whimsically describes himself as an adventurer and an early developer of the modern skateboard. He attended the University of California at Santa Barbara and earned a B.A. in English Literature. In between readings of Keats and Wordsworth, he took up surfing and zealously adopted the resident neo-beat-generation surfing subculture of Isla Vista, the off-campus “youth ghetto” overlooking the Pacific. Reminiscent of the narrator in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, soon after graduation and with practically no money, Kelley embarked on several solo, madcap, endless-summer surfing explorations beginning with sojourns at the international surfing Mecca of Biarritz, France, and moved on to Lisbon, Tangiers, Casablanca as well as other unnamed, hang-outs and breaks in southern Morocco and the Spanish Sahara. After a surf trip to the Caribbean and Central America, Kelley moved to Vail, Colorado, to ski and write his first novel. From Vail, he moved to San Francisco and was an account manager in commercial security and a freelance writer. His articles appeared in many publications, including Human Events Magazine, Townhall Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. During this period, Kelley returned to the mountains with his good friend, Christian Lustic, and climbed the five tallest peaks in the lower 48 states, including the Grand Tetons in Wyoming.

While in San Francisco, he met his future wife, the alluring Deborah Dickson. “I snatched her from a group of suiters in a move worthy of James Dean,” says Kelley. Although she disputes Kelley’s version of their meeting, she recounts, “He proposed, and I accepted his proposal after a whirlwind eight weeks.”

Today, they have two loving and successful sons, Brendan, a world-class skier, and Austin, an international surfer, both inheriting their father’s love of adventure and learning. “If it weren’t for my wife, I would have failed in life, and my sons would not be where they are today. She has been our gift from God,” he says.

In 2012, Kelley’s epochal book, Lessons from Fallen Civilizations, appeared to great acclaim. It not only answers many questions raised by the attacks of 9/11 but chronicles the rise of and causes for the fall of five great civilizations. It is a saga that begins on the plain of Marathon in 490 BC and ends with the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. Its main character is Western Civilization.

Today Kelley’s new book is a historical fiction novel, "An American Slave in Barbery – The Confessions of Tyler Prescott Jones". It is an allegory for the present and, like his first book, an adventure story that makes us remember – Freedom is always under siege.

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