Quiet transformations often begin with events that cannot be planned or controlled. In The Radical Radiance of the Fishing Fly, Lewis K. Schrager presents a story shaped by survival, emotional restraint, and the complicated bonds between siblings. Through measured storytelling, the book explores how loss and endurance can quietly reframe a life built on certainty.
Isolation and reflection shape a journey where certainty offers little refuge. Set against Alaska’s vast landscape, the story follows David Nichols as he joins his brother Larry after a cancer survival sustained by imagination and resilience. Larry had endured treatment by tying fishing flies and envisioning waters filled with life, carrying that hope into their shared expedition.
Among a tightly bonded group, unresolved tensions between the brothers resurface, exposing emotional distance shaped over years. David forms a connection with Kathy Sands, a fellow member of the fishing party marked by her own private losses, whose presence deepens the emotional stakes.
When the journey culminates in a secret nighttime mission driven by revenge, David is forced to confront fear, desire, and the fragile balance between emotional connection and reason.
Lewis K. Schrager is an author and playwright whose short fiction has twice been honored in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Contest and has appeared in numerous literary journals, including South Carolina Review, Cottonwood, and Bryant Literary Review. His plays have been produced in Baltimore and St. Paul, and The Radical Radiance of the Fishing Fly is his first published novel. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Schrager has also spent much of his professional career in global health, serving as an HIV/AIDS researcher at the National Institutes of Health and as a vaccine developer focused on tuberculosis prevention. Visit Lewis at his website.
