Electric Dreams

Description

Electric Dreams

a novel by Goutham Rao
ISBN: 978-1-963695-23-6 paperback $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-24-3 ebook $9.99

May 21, 2025

Simon Galves is a new writing instructor in a small college town. He settles into a dull but peaceful life until he is caught in a sudden storm and is struck by lightning. Remarkably, he survives with some injuries, and even more remarkably, the strike uncovers a compulsive desire to play the piano. Through flashbacks, we learn of Simon’s troubled childhood and his strained relationship with his distant mother, Helen. Through his piano obsession, he falls in love with Jenna, a music professor and pianist. Shortly after her death, Simon learns the truth about his mother.

Praise for Goutham Rao’s Electric Dreams

After Simon Galves is struck by lightning in Goutham Rao’s novel, Electric Dreams, the lonely writing teacher’s sudden and unexplained aptitude for the piano raises fundamental questions about the mind’s capacity to understand and express music and eventually the heart’s capacity to understand and express love. Similar to Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Rao takes us beyond the crippling effects of an isolated childhood with an overbearing mother and shines a light into the darkest reaches of trauma to reveal the greater power of compassion. Electric Dreams is a tender story tenderly told.

—Jill McCabe Johnson, author of Tangled in Vow & Beseech and Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown

Goutham Rao is a practicing family physician, researcher in cardiovascular prevention, endowed professor of medicine at Case Western Reserve University, and author of more than a hundred publications, including five books. He has taught writing skills to physicians and other health care professionals for more than twenty years. Within a large health care system, Dr. Rao is responsible for promoting wellness and preventing burnout among physicians. During the height of the pandemic, he personally found creative writing therapeutic and started and leads a group called “Words for Wellness,” which brings together health care professionals to discover the value of writing as both a creative outlet and a means to promote wellness. Dr. Rao grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and lives outside Cleveland.