Sign In

Welcome to the online press kit for Nancy Deville!

 

Author of Karma

 

"Karma isn't what we think it is — it's not the western translation of cause and effect. Karma is just a way that we can contribute, every time something happens to us, to life to make the world a better place." — Nancy Deville

 

Karma, the powerful first novel by author and women's rights advocate Nancy Deville, is more than the gripping tale of a western doctor abducted into the shadow world of sex slavery. It is a tale of courage, hope and spiritual awakening drawn from the author's "unconventional life."

 

The California native fell in love with writing as a Navy brat growing up in Japan. As a young woman, she hitchhiked across India for 10 months, worked as caretaker of a 150-year-old pirate's house in Spain and worked and traveled in Switzerland. Returning to the U.S., she launched a successful 15-year career as a fashion designer. In 1989, while studying English composition at the University of California in Santa Barbara, she was again inspired to write. 

 

That's when Deville wrote an early manuscript that 20 years later would become Karma. Publishers and Hollywood expressed interest, "but the public wasn't ready for a story on sex trafficking," she says.

 

Deville embarked on a new career as an investigative health writer. Her book Death by Supermarket: The Fattening, Dumbing Down, and Poisoning of America established her as a voice in the healthy food movement. All the while, she continued to research the global sex trade that enslaves 2.5 million women and children.

 

Karma is the product of Deville's insights from her world travels and decades of research into the problem of sexual trafficking worldwide. She found that trafficked women suffer from self-blame and low self-esteem, manifestations of post traumatic stress disorder that keep them from fighting back.

The book launched in January 2010, which President Obama proclaimed as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month (read the proclamation).

 

In the novel, protagonist Meredith Fitzgerald, a beautiful soon-to-be married American doctor, is drugged and abducted from a bazaar in Istanbul. She is sent to Mumbai and trapped in a brothel compound where she's expected to work as the doctor. But through this hell she finds strength, courage and spirituality.

 

And, she finds the true meaning of Karma in self-compassion: "When something bad happens to you it affords an opportunity to contribute to the good karma of the world with your actions to make the world a better place."

Self-compassion is a common thread through Deville's fiction and non-fiction books. "Finding a way to love yourself," she says, is a key to living a healthier life.

"Meredith's epiphany represents what I would like to see happen for all rescued victims of sex trafficking: the self compassion to accept that what happened to her is not her fault, that she was a victim and that she is a valuable human being who deserves happiness."

 

Download a One Pager 

 

Visit Nancy Deville's public Web site at www.nancydeville.com.

 

Media Contact is Michelle Tennant: Michelle@publicityresults.com, 828-749-3200.