It is always very heartening when people take time to write to you to tell you how much they are enjoying your book. Letters and emails have been coming in from the most unlikely places around the world to say they ordered Hellkite from Kenny's and have been reading stories to one another or discussing the different themes in their writing circles.
It is also rewarding when the reader gets it; knows what you are trying to do in the stories and see the patterns and nuances within the different ones. The limited-edition hardback is almost sold out but the paperback is still available in good bookshops. Here is another extract from:
The Devil’s Dye
First
Eliza must chase Marisolle from the barn. That girl with her pangolin eyes and
slouching walk carries bad spirits in her pocket and
every time she is within bleeding distance things start to unhappen. She is
best sent off to the fields at the end of the farm where she can sit in the
blistering heat and hex no one, float around the corn shucks; let the duende of her mind dance like a mad
thing – if that’s what a goblin does – but not here. Not here in the barn where
Eliza knows everything depends on it, the plantation’s livelihood, their house,
their mother’s nervous disposition.
Eliza gathers as many bundles of the
plant into her arms as she can manage and piles them into the big expanse of
vat that squats on the dusty floor. She
orders the servants to carry buckets of water from the cistern to the big zinc
bath, pour. The colour a dirty yellow,
the odour so offensive it chokes the whole space around them and they have to pull their aprons over their mouths, their
noses as they continue to bring more buckets to its rim.
‘Go now. Leave me.
She waits until Nathanial and Amos pull the big door
closed and apart from the light that comes through the slats of the windows and
the motes that scatter out around her, there is just herself and the putrid
container of mud liquid before her.
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