A Song of Innocence

Parents Jesse and Nina Dillon struggle to save their daughter from acute lymphocytic childhood leukemia, and grow spiritually independent throughout their ordeal.

A Song of Innocence A novel by Greg Herriges Jesse and Nina Dillon are your typical American parents, raising a nine-year-old daughter, Christy, the best they can, and enjoying the fruits of their labor of love, until the unthinkable happens. Christy is diagnosed with leukemia and suddenly nothing is the same; everything becomes part of the terrible struggle between life and death. Greg Herriges’s new novel, A Song of Innocence, speaks to the infinite nature of parents’ love for their children. Jesse and Nina are forced not only to battle their nine-year-old daughter’s leukemia; they struggle on a daily basis to endure, to find some meaning in the midst of helplessness, uncertainty, and agonizing sorrow. A compelling look at the vagaries of family dynamics and the austere realities of human biology, Herriges chronicles the lonely journey of one man’s soul as he attempts to keep alive love, hope, and desire in the face of almost certain defeat on all fronts. Ultimately, the question of whether there is an afterlife becomes secondary to his daughter’s transcendent and resolute discovery that “There is no death.”

Greg Herriges began writing professionally in his twenties with an investigative report on gangs for The Chicago Tribune Magazine, “Inherit the Streets.” Soon afterward, he met with his literary hero, J.D. Salinger at Salinger’s home in Cornish, New Hampshire, a meeting that resulted in his first national publication, a profle/interview with the iconic author. It decided Herriges to turn to fiction writing, and years later inspired his book-length JD: A Memoir of a Time and a Journey (Wordcraft of Oregon, 2006). He is the author of novels, short stories, and articles, as well as a series of literary DVD documentaries, including Thomas E. Kennedy: Copenhagen Quartet, and the award winning TC Boyle: The Art of the Story. His short works have appeared in Story Quarterly, The Literary Review, The South Carolina Review, The Encyclopedia of Beat Literature, and Great Britain’s Popular Music and Society and World Wide Writers. He is currently a professor of English at William Rainey Harper College in Palatine, Illinois. Herriges’s new anthology The Bay of Marseilles and Other Stories was recently published by Serving House Books, and his ebook novels Streethearts and Lennon and Me are available in ebook shops everywhere. A Song of Innocence is his sixth novel.