Lamp Black, Wolf Grey
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Artist Laura Matthews and her husband Dan have given up their city life and moved to an ancient longhouse high in the mountains of Wales. Here she knows the wild beauty will inspire her to produce her best art, and perhaps the powerful nature of the place will give her the baby they have longed for so many years.
But this high valley is home to others, too. Others such as Rhys, the charismatic loner from the croft, who pursues Laura with a fervor bordering on obsession. Or Anwen, the wise old woman from the neighboring farm who knows so much but seems to speak only in riddles.
And then there is Merlin. Once he too walked these hills, when he was young and his legend as a powerful seer and magician was just beginning. It was here he fell for a young maid, and here he learned the cost of his love.
In the Welsh mountains, so charged with tales and legends, Laura will find herself reaching through the gossamer-fine veil that separates her own world from Merlin’s and discover some landscapes hold more magic than others.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brackston (The Midnight Witch) shifts across time to tell the stories of two women separated by centuries but linked to the same man. When Londoners Laura and Dan Matthews relocate to a quaint mountain village in Wales, they hope to restore intimacy to their failing marriage. Instead, Laura's attention is drawn to the local legends surrounding onetime resident Merlin and to the man she keeps seeing walking through the woods, for whom she feels an overwhelming connection. Eight hundred years earlier, Megan, nursemaid to the village's malevolent lord, meets Merlin himself in those same woods and the two fall passionately in love. But when the wizard refuses to be complicit in the lord's warmongering plans, he places Megan in mortal danger, and the reverberations of that decision reach through the ages to touch Laura's life. Braxton's characters possess intriguing and ambiguous true natures, and her lush prose imbues the Welsh landscape with an enchantment all its own.
