Black Wine

Product Description As they struggle to survive in a barbarous fantasy land, a mother and daughter attempt to shake off the bonds of female slavery and escape to freedom. A first novel. Amazon.com Review Winner of the 1997 William J. Crawford Memorial Award (for a first fantasy novel), this utopian, archetypal story follows five generations of women--from the monumental, sadistic despot to her great-great-granddaughter working in a warehouse--through their travels away from and toward one another. Loves and deaths are passed through the generations, collected on their successive journeys, each restless character setting others in motion as she seeks freedom and kinship. Candas Jane Dorsey's concise language is powerful, telling an intense story without emotional plateaus, only peaks and valleys, joy and grief. This is an involving, unsettling book. It is easily one of the best and most ambitious novels of 1996 and one that will provoke thought and conversation. From Publishers Weekly An acclaimed poet and short-story writer in her native Canada, Dorsey is almost unknown in the States. That should change with the publication of this novel, her first. The narrative braids the lives of three women who are linked by their independent spirits as well as by blood. One is "the waif," a young slave whose strange dreams and troubling half-memories hint at a past she can't remember. When the waif is sold as a concubine to a prince in the distant northern Land of the Dark Isles, she begins a journey that will lead her to the secret of her past as well as to her future. Weaving the waif's tale with that of Essa, an adventurous young woman determined to find her mother, and the journal entries of a woman escaping a husband she neither loves nor wants, Dorsey creates a complex and human story about freedom, love and the need to retain one's own identity. The fantasy setting is stark, a world where the most brutal events are treated with cold matter-of-factness, but Dorsey's writing is strong, even unflinching. Those who enjoy the work of such popular feminist speculative fiction writers as Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin will find much to admire here. (Jan.) FYI: Dorsey is head of Tesseract Books, a leading Canadian SF publisher.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal For her first fantasy novel, Dorsey features an old woman in a cage who writes her diary in blood and tells her story to a curious young girl. This journey of self-discovery and identity fits in the feminist tradition of Joanna Russ. Recommended for fantasy collections.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Candas Jane Dorsey is the head of Tesseracts Books.