The Priorities of Love

Courage! Conflict! Forgiveness! Reconciliation! Romance! Hope! Faith!

Love, in all its tumultuous forms, infuses this book, via the fascinating tale of one man's life and his ménage of clan members and friends. Family love, romantic love, Christian love, joy and tragedy, hope and despair, and life's way of throwing catastrophic curveballs at us - all are juxtapositioned through the cast of people surrounding Adam Fraser, from babyhood to old age. Through the hinterland of Papua New Guinea and its vibrant peoples (and where his heart is captured by Polly, a petite English nurse), to Western Australia, magnificent New Zealand, Queensland, to England and Europe, from present-day and reaching back to World War I, Robert Simpson sympathetically melds the stories of this intriguing group of people into one sweeping saga that finds its beginnings and ends, over and over, to the present day. What shines through is love - for family, for Christ, and of the deeply romantic, everlasting kind between soul-mates.

Although most of his family came from Mosgiel, fifteen miles away, Robert Simpson was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in the 1940s. From the start of his life, he has been involved in good literature; on leaving school he spent two years working at a bookshop, the Presbyterian Bookroom. In 1965 he attended the New Zealand Bible College in Auckland for three years, obtaining a Licentiate of Theology. After working several years as a postman, Port Moresby called him to a Christian Literature Crusade, where he met his future wife, Margaret, an English missionary nurse and midwife. Twenty years later he studied at the United Theological College in Sydney for three years, was ordained and inducted into the Presbyterian Church in 1988, and became a Presbyterian parish minister in Christchurch, New Zealand. In later life he suffered a bout of clinical depression and electro-convulsive therapy, and was forced to retire following a severe stroke, but has been writing devotional books and novels ever since, with the help of his best critic - wife Margaret. Between them they have four boys, each of whom has his own family, and so the generations continue.