After her mother dies in childbirth, Madeleine is left to bring up her younger sister in a remote cottage on the west coast of Scotland. Tainted by the discovery that she is illegitimate, Madeleine is plunged into poverty in London before desperately marrying a wealthy cousin of her father's, who does not know her true identity. And thus she comes to live at the old family estate of Eden in the hills of Jamaica often talked about by her mother—a beautiful, decaying house with its overgrown garden, lush sugar plantation, and myriads of secrets.
Michelle Paver was born in central Africa but went to England as a child. After earning a degree in biochemistry from Oxford University, she became a partner in a London law firm but eventually gave that up to write full-time. The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series came from Michelle's lifelong passions for animals, anthropology, and the distant past-as well as an encounter with a large bear in a remote valley in Southern California. To research the books, Michelle has traveled to Finland, Greenland, Sweden, Norway, Arctic Canada, and the Carpathian Mountains. She has slept on reindeer skins, swum with wild killer whales, and gotten nose to nose with polar bears--and, of course, wolves. The first four books have been made into widely acclaimed audiobooks, read by Ian McKellen.
