Book description
On Cloudrock the penalty for imperfection is death: death by the long
fall into the void, through the poisonous mists and gases that rise from
the deadlands far, far below.
The two tribes who survive on the Rock, the tribes of Day and Night,
keep their families tight, their bloodlines pure and true, by incest, by
cannibalism and by murder. Parcelling out their tiny world in measures
of light and time, they wrap themselves in ritual and taboo, each family
denying the presence of the other. Then came the Shadow.
Born to the matriarch Catrunner, the Shadow is deformed - a neuter dwarf
- a natural candidate for instant death. But for this mutant, fate
intervenes. The Shadow may live - on the condition that none acknowledge
its presence: one word, one glance, and the Shadow will join its
luckless kin in the long death-flight.
Surviving on the outskirts of the family, the Shadow's very existence
creates an unspoken question that challenges the ties that bind. This is
the Shadow's tale... Garry Kilworth (1941 -)
Garry Douglas Kilworth was born in York in 1941 and travelled widely as
a child, his father being a serviceman. After seventeen years in the RAF
and eight working for Cable and Wireless, he attended King's College,
London University, where he obtained an honours degree in English. Garry
Kilworth has published novels under a number of pseudonyms in the fields
of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Historical Fiction and Children's Fiction,
winning the British and World Fantasy Awards and being twice shortlisted
for the prestigious Carnegie Award for Children's Literature.
