Tosca Lee's Blog

The Long March Home .99 Sale!

This week only! From July 8-14, 2025, get The Long March Home for just 99¢!



"A tour de force."--Publishers Weekly starred review

"A must-read literary triumph."--Booklist starred review

GET YOUR COPY: https://toscalee.com/product/the-long...

Jimmy Propfield joined the army for two reasons: to get out of Mobile, Alabama, with his best friends Hank and Billy and to forget his high school sweetheart, Claire.

Life in the Philippines seems like paradise–until the morning of December 8, 1941, when news comes from Manila: Imperial Japan has bombed Pearl Harbor. Within hours, the teenage friends are plunged into war as enemy warplanes attack Luzon, beginning a battle for control of the Pacific Theater that will culminate with a last stand on the Bataan Peninsula and end with the largest surrender of American troops in history.

What follows will become known as one of the worst atrocities in modern warfare: the Bataan Death March. With no hope of rescue, the three friends vow to make it back home together. But the ordeal is only the beginning of their nearly four-year fight to survive.

Inspired by true stories, The Long March Home is a gripping coming-of-age tale of friendship, sacrifice, and the power of unrelenting hope.

A Guide to Tosca's Books

If you’re new or new-ish to my books and wondering which you should read/start with, here’s a handy guide:

Love historical fiction? Try The Long March Home for WWII historical, or Iscariot, The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen, or Havah: The Story of Eve for Biblical historical about the life and times of Jesus or the enigmatic Queen of Sheba or the Bible’s first woman.

Love a good thriller? Try The Line Between and its sequel, A Single Light, for thrills with an apocalyptic twist, or The Progeny and its sequel, Firstborn, for a run-for-your-life globetrotting adventure.

Love supernatural suspense? Try Demon: A Memoir for a glimpse inside the spiritual realm.

Love dystopian? Try the Books of Mortals series (Forbidden, Mortal, Sovereign), set 500 years in the future.

Love women’s fiction? Try Havah: The Story of Eve for a literary twist or The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen.

Love YA? Try The Progeny and Firstborn for an adventure with a YA feel.

Long March Home Named 2025 One Book One Nebraska

The Long March Home has been named as the 2025 selection for One Book One Nebraska. The selection was announced at the Nebraska Celebration of Books on October 12.

The One Book One Nebraska reading program is sponsored by the Nebraska Center for the Book, Humanities Nebraska, and the Nebraska Library Commission. It encourages Nebraskans across the state to read and discuss the same book, chosen from books written by Nebraska authors or that have a Nebraska theme or setting. A Nebraska Center for the Book committee selected three finalists from a list of nineteen titles nominated by Nebraskans. Nebraska Center for the Book board members voted on the 2025 selection. The other two finalists were My Nebraska: The Good, the Bad, and the Husker by Roger Welsch and The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles.

The Long March Home, by Marcus Brotherton and Nebraska author Tosca Lee, was inspired by true stories.

About the book:

Jimmy Propfield joined the army for two reasons: to get out of Mobile, Alabama, with his best friends Hank and Billy and to forget his high school sweetheart, Claire.

Life in the Philippines seems like paradise—until the morning of December 8, 1941, when news comes from Manila: the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor. Within hours, the teenage friends are plunged into war as Japanese warplanes attack Luzon, beginning a battle for control of the Pacific Theater that will culminate with a last stand on the Bataan Peninsula and end with the largest surrender of American troops in history.

What follows will become known as one of the worst atrocities in modern warfare: the Bataan Death March. With no hope of rescue, the three friends vow to make it back home together. But the ordeal is only the beginning of their nearly four-year fight to survive.

Sweater Weather Giveaway!

It’s my Sweater Weather Readers’ Giveaway! Up for grabs: 11 books in a variety of genres, book gifts, and a Tree of Life necklace to celebrate the new fourth edition of my novel, Havah: The Story of Eve. Enter here for a chance to win. Contest ends at midnight October 16. Winner will be notified via email.

The Long March Home on Short List for One Book, One Nebraska

The Long March Home has been named one of three finalists for the 2025 One Book, One Nebraska reading program.

The One Book One Nebraska reading program is sponsored by the Nebraska Center for the Book, Humanities Nebraska, and the Nebraska Library Commission. It encourages Nebraskans across the state to read and discuss the same book, chosen from books written by Nebraska authors or with a Nebraska theme or setting. A Nebraska Center for the Book committee selected the three finalists from a list of nineteen titles nominated by Nebraskans.

The Long March Home, by Marcus Brotherton and Nebraska writer Tosca Lee, is historical fiction inspired by true stories of friendship, sacrifice, and hope on the Bataan March.

The winner will be announced on October 12, 2024, at the Nebraska Celebration of Books literary festival.




Read the entire release here: https://nlcblogs.nebraska.gov/nlcblog...

THE LONG MARCH HOME wins International Book Award

Here’s some fun news: The Long March Home just won the International Book Award in Historical Fiction. Tosca Lee and co-author Marcus Brotherton are so honored to shine a light on those who served in WWII in the Philippines and honored for the recognition of our twelve years of combined work bringing this story to life.

This marks Tosca’s third International Book Award. A Single Lightwon in Science Fiction, and The Line Between won in Mystery/Suspense.

American Book Fest announced the winners and finalists of THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOK AWARDS (IBA). The awards cover books from all sections of the publishing industry. A 21-year timeline and award archives can be found at http://americanbookfest.com/aboutusco...

Winding Road

I always remember writing. I didn’t think much of it; it was just something I did. I published my first article when my beloved third-grade teacher, an elderly lady with big sunburst brooches, suggested I write an article about the death of my bulldog, Oliver, for a local pet lovers’ newsletter. (This, in the day when newsletters actually arrived in your mailbox.) It was very dramatic (“Was this my dog, my Oliver, that was dead? No! No, not my dog! Not my Oliver!”) and they published it with a byline and my picture a few months later.

I won a couple of young authors contests after that with poetry inspired by Shel Silverstein and a school short story contest in high school. I wrote incessantly—particularly in class when I was bored—and I loved to read, but my passion was ballet. I sewed ribbons on pointe shoes during school lunch breaks, did homework in the car while shuttling an hour away from Lincoln to dance with the Omaha Ballet, spent my summers in Kansas City, Illinois, and New York.



My dream of permanently gnarled toes got sidelined when I tore a groin at fourteen. And though I continued to dance, my professional dreams, I knew, were over.

Back home during spring break my freshman year at Smith College, I was talking with my dad about that summer’s plans, which consisted of studying economics abroad and working at a bank. It was assumed for a while that I’d eventually join an ad agency or maybe become a news anchor (I really don’t know why). But during that talk, I blurted: “I really want to write a novel.” I had loved the emotional ride of favorite books like The Clan of the Cave Bear and wanted to see if I could create something for another reader to enjoy.

Dad, by then an author of some thirty academic books, said, “Okay. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll pay you what you would have made at the bank if you put the time you would have spent working there into writing a novel.”

So I spent my spare time at Oxford that summer gathering information on the Neolithic Stonehenge people and preparing to write an epic historical novel.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Somehow I would have to figure out who these people were, what they wore and ate, whom they worshipped, and what their stories were. I read an entire suitcase worth of books, highlighter in hand. I printed a sparse outline on my dot matrix printer and laid it alongside a pile of research notes, more or less organized by category, on one long, continuous ream of perforated printer paper.

I typed the whole thing on the “portable” (“trans-portable,” Dad and I always joked) PC I had lugged all the way to college and back for the summer, with its tiny six-inch screen in WordStar.

It was hard. I didn’t know what should happen from one chapter to the next. Had to figure out how to incorporate all these precious research details into a narrative I constructed as mechanically as a house. I ate chicken salad sandwiches and pecked away at the keyboard of the trans-portable PC on my bedroom desk while friends went to the pool.

But at least I wasn’t working at the bank.

It took me two summers to finish that book, which I dramatically titled Twilight of the Ancients and packed off to Writer’s House—bound with an illustrated cover and 23-page synopsis—seeking representation.

I was soundly rejected. But in the course of the reader’s two-page analysis—a gift in itself—about the two-dimensional quality of my characters, lack of story tension, and unclear and unanswered story questions, a single line stood out to me:

“…comparable to Clan of the Cave Bear.”

Never mind that I had made every newbie mistake known to man in my submission, that the book itself was one long 360-page exercise in how not to write a novel. The reader had compared me to Clan of the Cave Bear.

I was hooked. I was going to become a novelist.

But not right away.

I wrote for two years on the staff of Smart Computing magazine after college, during which time I also wrote two computer books. It wasn’t what I dreamed of doing, but it was paid writing—which I assumed made me a professional—and I learned a lot.

I first got the idea for Demon in 1998 while driving home on a hypnotizing stretch of Nebraska road. I was in the middle of another project, a fantasy novel about a woman warrior I had (non)affectionately named The Book That Will Kill Me, if only because I had spent years writing and re-writing the first 100 pages. (Yet another error I learned the hard way.)

I jotted down the idea of a demon telling his story, planning to revisit it someday after I had vanquished The Book That Will Kill Me.

“Some day” turned out to be only a few hours later when my motherboard short-circuited as I sat down to write. It fizzled and popped inside the case, a tiny wisp of smoke drifting out the vent. I sulked out to the sofa with notepad and paper, determined to march on.

Nothing came. At last, I flipped the page and began to write this demon idea. The story that would become Demon: A Memoir was finished six weeks later.

Behold, The Book That Will Kill Me gave way to The Book That Was Meant to Be.

Or so I thought.

At some point during the six years I waited for Demon to sell, I randomly penned a single page in the voice of the earth’s first woman. I imagined her nearly 900 years old and near death, preparing at last to tell her full story. And then I put the page away in a drawer where I kept scribbles and random story notes and forgot about it.

In 2004, I ran into local author Steph Whitson at the day spa.

“How’s the writing?” she asked.

I think I grunted.

A few weeks later she sent me a newsletter (the bonafide, printed kind) with an article circled. A new imprint, looking for books exactly like Demon.

My shiny new agent sent Demon off and two weeks later, the editor wrote to say he wanted it.

And then he left the imprint.

Several months and much hand-wringing later, the same editor sent it to committee at his new publishing house. They decided they wanted it—if I could rewrite the entire thing.

I didn’t think I could—didn’t know how. I balked, stymied.

And then I rewrote it.

While negotiating the sale of Demon, my soon-to-be-editor asked what else I had. I looked blankly around, phone to my ear, and yanked open my drawer of scribbles. 
“I have this!” I said, pulling out the fringed notebook page about Eve. The house bought Demon in a three-book deal and I set to work writing Havah: The Story of Eve.

For the second time in my writing life, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. A year later, Genesis commentaries, horticulture textbooks, books on ancient farming, early weapons, textiles, basket weaving, brick-making, and early civilizations littered my floor alongside a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

I was fascinated with the emotional journey of Adam and Eve, with the potential for tension between the alpha Adam and his first son, the idea of seeing a first infant, the first death, the first enmity between human and animal and dysfunction in relationship.

But there was a problem. I was paralyzed by Demon’s early success, which had garnered strong reviews and award nominations in the first months of its release. And here I was, about to prove myself a one-hit wonder.

I chased Eve’s story in a dogged panic and overwrote the first draft by 67,000 words (about 260 pages).

Some time after Havah released with a starred review from Publishers Weekly, a reviewer compared it to Clan of the Cave Bear in all the best ways.

That was a sweet, sweet day.

My Favorite Part

I recently wrote about my favorite part of writing for Rogue Women Writers. I'm sharing an excerpt here.



Sometimes, people ask me what my favorite part of writing is.

It’s not first drafts. Pull my fingernails out with pliers, why don’t you.

Rewriting and editing is much more fun. That’s where I roll my sleeves up and really get to work. Because now I’ve got that messy lump of clay on the wheel, something to work with.

But the best part is having written. People denigrate writers like this—that there are those who love to write and those who love having written. But having written means I can get out and be with readers, which is by far the best part of being a writer. After all, it was a love for stories that made most writers want to write in the first place.

I’m also a big believer that something mystical happens between my pen (okay, my fingernails and the keyboard) and the printed words, and between the printed words and the reader’s heart. Something that I wasn’t a part of, that isn’t technically even my business.

Want to read more? Click the link below for the rest of the story.

https://roguewomenwriters.com/my-favo...

Holiday Bookish Giveaway!

It's my big holiday giveaway! Over $150 worth of surprise bookish gifts and fun favorite things (including chocolate) all wrapped and ready to be sent to one lucky winner.

Enter to win this prize package of 14 mystery gifts—including bookish delights, a tote from my local indie bookstore, and yummy delights! The winner will be drawn on Black Friday so enter to win before 6:00 a.m. November 24, 2023.

Due to shipping costs, this giveaway is open to those with US mailing addresses.

ENTER NOW at https://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/dis...

In Honor of Veterans

In honor of veterans, The Long March Home: A World War II Novel of the Pacific hardcovers are only $12 with free shipping from Baker Book House. This special runs through November 14th. We hope you find yourself engrossed in this tale of hope, courage, friendship, and the true stories that inspired it. Link for this great deal: https://bakerbookhouse.com/products/4...



Gifting a copy of this book? Drop Cindy an email at cindy@toscalee.com to request a free bookplate signed by Marcus and me.