(DOWNLOAD) "The Tithe" by JoAnne Soper-Cook # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free

eBook details

Title: The Tithe
Author : JoAnne Soper-Cook
Release Date : January 13, 2013
Genre: Fiction & Literature,Books,Sci-Fi & Fantasy,Fantasy,Paranormal,
Pages : * pages
Size : 235 KB

Description

When mortician Marcella Bliss finds her husband Michael dead on Christmas morning, an apparent suicide, she cannot know that Michael, a police officer, never recovered from the trauma of accidentally shooting a young man during a standoff one hot August afternoon. She flees in search of solace to the summer home she and Michael owned together, in the sleepy Newfoundland village known as Guernsey, a place rife with tales of shipwrecks and fairy women and the strange, mysterious tribe who appear in Guernsey every year and are gone before first frost. Some speculate they are some forgotten remnants of the Daone Sidhe, brought to the New World aboard the same boats that prosecuted the great North Atlantic fishery; some others think they are the souls of the unbaptized dead. Everyone in Guernsey agrees upon one thing: the strangers have great power to affect the living and are to be feared and avoided.

In another time and place, the English poet John Keats is learning how to live in a world he could never have imagined: a world of electricity and diesel power, of horseless carriages that move as fast as thought, of a people whose connection to the land and to the ancient world of nature is being rapidly eroded by the progress of technology.

Marcella's pilgrimage to Guernsey attracts the attention of the deaf fiddle-maker Lleu Keeping, the son of a human man and a woman found at sea – a woman without hair or human speech, who homesick for the life she had forsaken, ultimately pined away, leaving nothing in her coffin but the smell of salt and a hundredweight of sand.

Lleu's only companion is the girl Alanna Morrow, a modern Traveller whose people earn their living by busking or by begging, who set up temporary homes for themselves along the rugged coastline, and who disappear again before the snow flies. Alanna's brothers, musicians all, know the ancient tunes that Lleu desires to learn, but before they will teach him he must consent to be Taken – to stay with them for a season in the shadowy otherland that they inhabit, a dark place which overlays the modern city like a veil.

What Marcella wants from Lleu he cannot give: a thorough knowledge of the otherworld, of what comes after. Too soon she is forced to confront a harsh reality when a search for her missing sister leads her to a strange young woman lying silent and brain-dead in a London hospital. At the request of her Aunt Josephine – a Roma Holocaust survivor – Marcella does what must be done, assisted in her task by a man who in this modern world has taken for himself the name of JOHN OSTLER, but who is Keats, somehow restored to life and health by mysterious means. It is Keats Marcella turns to when she receives the devastating prescience of her own death, and it is Keats who is by her side when she dies peacefully in Rome: “Lift me up,” she says. “Thank God it has come at last.”