Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Ralph W. Perry, a longtime DXer and author, for sharing news of his latest novel, Pacific Dream – Mari Mango & an Accidental Orphanage.

This is the third novel in Ralph’s Pacific Trilogy, following Pacific Odyssey, which we featured here on the SWLing Post in 2024. While Pacific Dream is certainly a departure from our usual radio-related fare, Ralph’s long experience as a DXer—and his decades of living and traveling in Southeast Asia—give his fiction a distinctly international flavor.

The story follows twenty-two-year-old Marielle Margaux, who flees to Thailand following a cheating fiancé and a scandal at her charity job. Hoping to disappear into anonymity, Mari instead finds herself mistaken for a Western nun and handed the keys to a crumbling seaside hotel. Before long, she is responsible for an unlikely refuge for women and babies escaping Bangkok’s bar-girl world, forcing her to navigate frightened mothers, hungry infants, suspicious villagers, and a particularly earnest graduate student who seems to appear at precisely the wrong moments.

Ralph describes the book as “a funny, warm, cross-cultural novel about reinvention, cultural misfires, identity, and the messy ways we end up saving one another.”

And, as Ralph puts it, this is what happens when you “send a DXer abroad for three decades”—a “lovingly wry view of the situation one finds himself in!”

For a limited time, Ralph is offering the ebook as part of a special launch-week promotion. The ebook is just $0.99 through Thursday, with the price returning to normal on Friday.

If you’re interested in international travel, Southeast Asian culture, or simply enjoy a good cross-cultural adventure with a healthy dose of humor, you may want to give Ralph’s latest novel a look.

Click here to check it out on Amazon.com.

Note that this affiliate link supports the author and the SWLing Post.