Hungry for Touch by Laureen Peltier Named 2016 Foreword Indies Book of the Year Finalist

Minneapolis, MN, March 30, 2017 --(PR.com)-- Hungry for Touch: A Journey from Fear to Desire (ISBN 978-0-9968228-0-0, Inhoe Press, 2016) by Laureen Peltier has been named as a finalist for the 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the category of psychology. The book is a gripping real life story of a woman who struggles to recover from childhood sexual abuse, and with the help of an exceptional and unconventional psychiatrist is able to confront this horrendous event and triumph. As part of ForeWord Review’s mission to discover, review, and share the best books from small, university, and indie publishers, Foreword Reviews conducts an annual awards program each year. Finalists represent the best books published in the preceding year, and submitted to Foreword Reviews for award consideration, and were narrowed down by Foreword’s editors from over 2,200 individual titles spread across 65 categories. The award is considered one of the most prestigious in the publishing world. Winners will be announced on June 24, 2017 at the 2017 American Library Association Annual Conference in Chicago, IL.

“I am very honored and humbled that Hungry for Touch has been selected as a finalist for the 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award,” said Laureen Peltier. “I hope that this book can serve as an inspiration for others and create awareness of the issue of sexual assault and the ability to recover.”

Hungry for Touch is the real-life story of author, Laureen Peltier. Peltier was the sixth of eight children, the youngest of the five girls. She and all of her sisters were repeatedly and regularly sexually molested by their father when they were children. Each developed their own method of coping - Laureen's was to pretend nothing was wrong in her adult life. But she could not stand to let herself be touched, or have any form of intimate relationship with a man, and sexual harassment from her boss triggered a crisis that could no longer be covered up.

During that crisis, she met Dr. Erickson, a psychiatrist whose unconventional theories - including longer sessions and an information-processing technique called EMDR - offered her hope of a recovery without a lifetime spent in therapy. But could she survive the pain of reliving her past, and stay in the fight to reclaim the strong, loving, sexually-confident woman she knew she wanted to be? Hungry for Touch is both heart-rending and heart-giving, a painful and beautiful first-person account of a woman's quest to reintegrate the broken parts of herself, while reliving memories of events no child should have had to face. Peltier is willing to put everything on the page - fear and courage, trauma and resilience, violation and self-protection.

Established in 1998 the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award is one of the most recognized literary awards in the world. With finalists announced, the books will now go on to final judging by an expert panel of librarians and booksellers curated specifically for each genre and who will determine the books that will be named Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award winners.