Jarred, recently come of age, is leaving the sun-scorched desert village that has always been his home. He sets out with a band of friends to see the mighty and beautiful kingdom of the north and to seek out the truth about his father, who came to the village a stranger and departed when Jarred was ten, never to return. After the travellers are set upon in a ravine and several of their number sustain injuries, they seek shelter in the Marsh of Slievmordhu - a cool green world of dazzling beauty as different from their homeland as night and day. Here, Jarred meets Lilith, and in a single moment he realizes that his life can never be the same again. But neither of the young lovers is aware how closely linked their fates - and their past - really are. During a visit to Cathair Rua, the Red City, Jarred stumbles across the secret of the Iron Tree, and with it an unbearable truth about his father's identity...'Dart-Thornton's "Bitterbynde" trilogy - each book and all three together - deserves to win every fantasy award there is' - Tanith Lee. 'Hobbit-fanciers will find much to delight them' - "The Times".
Cecilia was discovered, as a baby, in a wooden lifeboat that washed ashore on the rugged coastline of a remote isle in the southern oceans, between Australia and Antarctica. She spent her early years on Si-Sique Island, raised with the family of the lighthouse-keeper, Albert Ross, who found and adopted her.
Her origins could not be traced. Who were her parents? Had they been drowned in a boating accident? Where had she come from? Was she of noble blood? Alas, no answers could be found.
Cecilia flourished like a rare orchid, even on that windswept isle,in the rough-and-tumble company of her seven stepbrothers. They taught her fencing, archery and equestrian skills, at which she excelled. Her favourite hobby, however, was writing stories.
Recently, at the age of sixteen, she was 'discovered' on the Internet when she posted some of her work to an Online Writing Workshop. An editor contacted her by email, and within a few weeks Time Warner U.S.A. had signed Cecilia in a six-figure deal. They published her first trilogy, THE BITTERBYNDE, in hardcover - the first time they have ever done so with a new author.
Cecilia packed her mascara and departed from Si-Sique isle - to the sorrow of her seven handsome stepbrothers, who were all achingly in love with her.
THE BITTERBYNDE series has now been translated into four languages and is distributed throughout more than seventy countries.
Cecilia's life alternates between seen and unseen worlds of vivid strangeness, beauty, peril and passion.
It is a little-known fact that most authors actually write their own biographies. Some might say that for Cecilia the boundaries between virtuality and reality are blurred. It is for the reader to decide whether this is a completely implausible fairytale or whether it contains a grain of truth...
