A powerful and compelling tale of the birthplace of Merlin by the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Mythago Wood.
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In those days Broceliande was a terrible place, an ancient gloomy forest growing over misty dells, forgotten stones, a place of hidden lakes and strangling thickets. Though the true heart of Broceliande could never be found, the stink of its corruption oozed from the edgewood, shedding ghosts like autumn leaves. This was the forest of legend, where Merlin had come to dream his magic and the enchantress Vivien had come to beguile that magic from him.
Martin and Rebecca have long since fled the forest, but when they are forced to return years later for their mother's funeral, they are at once ensnared in the forest's net of enchantment, an evil that has held the local villages in a root-strong grip. And when Rebecca gives birth to Daniel, a beautiful child who is deaf, dumb and blind, she finds herself sucked into a twilight world where she can see only strange, mysterious shadows.
Robert Holdstock (1948 - 2009) Robert Paul Holdstock was born in a remote corner of Kent, sharing his childhood years between the bleak Romney Marsh and the dense woodlands of the Kentish heartlands. He received an MSc in medical zoology and spent several years in the early 1970s in medical research before becoming a full-time writer in 1976. His first published story appeared in the New Worlds magazine in 1968 and for the early part of his career he wrote science fiction. However, it is with fantasy that he is most closely associated.
1984 saw the publication of Mythago Wood, winner of the BSFA and World Fantasy Awards for Best Novel, and widely regarded as one of the key texts of modern fantasy. It and the subsequent 'mythago' novels (including Lavondyss, which won the BSFA Award for Best Novel in 1988) cemented his reputation as the definitive portrayer of the wild wood. His interest in Celtic and Nordic mythology was a consistent theme throughout his fantasy and is most prominently reflected in the acclaimed Merlin Codex trilogy, consisting of Celtika, The Iron Grail and The Broken Kings, published between 2001 and 2007.
Among many other works, Holdstock co-wrote Tour of the Universe with Malcolm Edwards, for which rights were sold for a space shuttle simulation ride at the CN Tower in Toronto, and The Emerald Forest, based on John Boorman's film of the same name. His story, 'The Ragthorn', written with friend and fellow author Garry Kilworth, won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella and the BSFA Award for Short Fiction.
Robert Holdstock died in November 2009, just four months after the publication of Avilion, the long-awaited, and sadly final, return to Ryhope Wood.
www.robertholdstock.com
For more information see www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/holdstock_robert_p
