Yorktown Author Debuts “Nuclear Romance”
When you are a journalist your job is to be an informational resource to your audience. You get to know issues inside and out and sometimes you develop a passion for an issue based on what you have learned. Then professionally, you have to move on to the next story.
Yorktown resident Abby Luby is a journalist who took what she learned from reporting and created a novel. Luby recently released her debut book “Nuclear Romance,” which details the lives of several people who are affected by an aging nuclear power plant in the northeast United States.
As a journalist the story started to take shape for Luby as she worked for some of the region’s largest newspapers, the Poughkeepsie Journal, NY Daily News and Westchester Guardian. Moving to Yorktown and hearing the sirens from Entergy’s Indian Point Energy Center being tested also sparked her interest.
“Writers write about what they know and because I live just a few miles from Indian Point, I became concerned about safety issues,” said Luby. “As a journalist, when I started writing about the plant, a fictional story started to evolve based on what it meant to live near a nuclear power plant.”
Conflict in the story first sparks when a mother loses her seven-year-old daughter from swimming in water that was possibly tainted with radioactive waste. Through that tragedy a nearby nuclear power plant is implicated and an entire series of events take off that intertwine the lives of many people into one web. The corporate people working in the plant, an anti-nuclear activist, a sports journalist and even a whistleblower all emerge throughout the plot, each one involved in some way or another.
Luby describes the book as a love story where the protagonist and heroine fall into a very serious relationship. There is also a backstory, which tells the struggles of journalists and the woes of newsprint dying out entirely.
“’Nuclear Romance’ is not only about a dangerous nuclear power plant,” said Luby. “But how people deal with what seems to be a formidable opponent – the nuclear industry. The main message is that there are always ways to pursue an agenda and wage a campaign for what we believe is right.”
“Nuclear Romance,” which is available as an ebook through Armory New Media, will be available on all ebook platforms and retailers, including Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Nobel Nook, Apple iBookstore, Sony Reader and Kobo by mid-October.
Ready to take on the next issue, Luby is contemplating writing about hydraulic fracturing next. “I am becoming interested in the fracking issue – we’ll see where it goes,” she said.
Adam has worked in the local news industry for the past two decades in Westchester County and the broader Hudson Valley. Read more from Adam’s author bio here.