Cirrus@Austlit

'The first of a suite of novels inspired by the ancient myths of Northern Europe. Berlin in autumn: Christine Starlight is living in an artist's colony in the crumbling urban shadows of the old east. Her lover Jude is a painter whose patience and beauty have eased her long battle with chronic pain, but Christine begins to be haunted by recollections of her childhood, of a little girl's disappearance and the flapping of a blackbird's wings. Then her life is rocked by the return of her childhood friend - a crimson-haired beauty who presides over a land where a witch lives in a well, a wolf is the queen's counsellor, and fate turns on the fall of an autumn leaf. As Christine grows addicted to Mayfridh's faery world, where mortals feel no pain, so Mayfridh grows addicted to Christine's, and falls deeply and dangerously in love with Jude. But while jealousies, betrayals and secrets begin to unpick the threads of their lives, they are unaware of the ghastly threat which stalks them: the cruel and brilliant billionaire Immanuel Z, who is hunting faery bones for a grand sculpture.'

Source: Publisher's website www.voyageronline.com.au (Sighted 21/4/10)

When an ancient golden bear is found walled up in a dilapidated St Petersburg bathhouse, researcher Daniel St Clare and his frosty colleague Em Hayward set out for Arkhanelsk to verify its age. But in the deep of night they are mysteriously set adrift. Lost and exhausted, they turn north, sinking ever deeper into the secrets and terrors of the Russian landscape. Daniel's lost love, the wild and beautiful Rosa Kovalenka, knows the only way to save him is to outwit the haunted Chenchikov family. But their home, deep in unknowable, impenetrable forests, is a shadowy tangle of grief, desire and treachery. Only Papa Grigory, full of tales and riddles of times past, seems to have the knowledge they need...But will he destroy them all in order for his world to survive? - from Libraries Australia catalogue entry (Pymble, 2005 imprint).