THE THEME OF THE QUINTET.
There are certain men and women upon whose hearts and souls the world leaves the deepest of scars, people who carry the memory of those happenings upon them like a cloud of invisible dust. And on their paths through life, unknown to them, that dust spreads into the eyes and ears and souls of some of those whose lives they pass through, others whose journeys then often take a different course. These paths may be long or short, passing between belief and the void, between redemption and nothingness... but in the end there is either only oblivion or a place of peace, a cold stone that belies the truth of the life and memory beneath it.
These five novels tell the story of such a life and such a memory, of its consequences, of the strange refractions and reflections as it passes in its many forms through the violent years of 1915 - 1960, the years when History and freedom collided and good and evil coalesced. In this turbulence the dust of the memory swirls its way between, carried on the fate of strangers and friends.
BOOK I: LIEVE
She arrived at the house in Scotland in the Autumn of 1915, a young Belgian escaping the Great War. Quiet and unassuming, she seemed small in her blue coat, as insubstantial as the rain that followed the carriage from the station. But from the first, everything and everyone around her changed, a strange inexplicable attraction drew them to her, even though she seemed to want to be alone... and they were happier, but no one really knew why....
Only Henry, recovering from his own wounds from the same war, begins to feel her strangeness, to sense a certain hidden darkness around her, something that makes him uneasy.... And then odd things start happening around her?.... As he watches and becomes more involved with her he realises that something is drawing in about her, about him, about all of them... but what is it?.... Or is it just his own mad imagination?.....
There are certain men and women upon whose hearts and souls the world leaves the deepest of scars, people who carry the memory of those happenings upon them like a cloud of invisible dust. And on their paths through life, unknown to them, that dust spreads into the eyes and ears and souls of some of those whose lives they pass through, others whose journeys then often take a different course. These paths may be long or short, passing between belief and the void, between redemption and nothingness... but in the end there is either only oblivion or a place of peace, a cold stone that belies the truth of the life and memory beneath it.
These five novels tell the story of such a life and such a memory, of its consequences, of the strange refractions and reflections as it passes in its many forms through the violent years of 1915 - 1960, the years when History and freedom collided and good and evil coalesced. In this turbulence the dust of the memory swirls its way between, carried on the fate of strangers and friends.
BOOK I: LIEVE
She arrived at the house in Scotland in the Autumn of 1915, a young Belgian escaping the Great War. Quiet and unassuming, she seemed small in her blue coat, as insubstantial as the rain that followed the carriage from the station. But from the first, everything and everyone around her changed, a strange inexplicable attraction drew them to her, even though she seemed to want to be alone... and they were happier, but no one really knew why....
Only Henry, recovering from his own wounds from the same war, begins to feel her strangeness, to sense a certain hidden darkness around her, something that makes him uneasy.... And then odd things start happening around her?.... As he watches and becomes more involved with her he realises that something is drawing in about her, about him, about all of them... but what is it?.... Or is it just his own mad imagination?.....
