Octavia, a strong willed young woman, making her own way as an artist, dreams of changing the minds of her audience but soon is forced to question her own motives in the company of a Zen monk who suggests: “Tell a wise man, or else keep silent.”

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Octavia Chavez, eighteen and fiercely passionate, has spent her life listening to the remote music of the stars, which only she seems to hear. She has a forbidden love of which she dares not speak, and a longing for wild, empty places. Her one true friend is a sanguine, seventy-seven-year-old wood-carver, Alejandro Jaramillo. Alejandro has been carving angels ever since he was summoned to do so at the age of ten. These two unlikely friends share one thing: a sense of having been called to something that lifts them towards an experience of the sacred. But when Octavia is involved in a life-threatening accident, and Alejandro begins to have dreams in which thousands of angels fall away from him into a bottomless abyss, they are both forced to question everything they have come to assume about themselves and their place in the world. So begins a voyage of discovery on which silence and dark music, new love and ancient landscapes will test their resolve to inhabit their own, inimitable lives. In prose that is both refreshingly muscular and hauntingly lyrical, Grenfell Fairhead invites us to examine what it means to grow up and truly belong, but also¯even more crucially¯what it could mean to grow down into one’s own center, learning the slow, fierce discipline of paying attention to each fleeting moment.

Barbara Grenfell Fairhead was born in the United Kingdom in 1939, and has lived most of her life in South Africa. After her first visit to New Mexico in the early 1990s, it became her second home. She made many extended visits over a period of twenty years, staying in her casita close to Black Mesa. She is an artist, writer, poet and lyricist, and lives in Cape Town with her husband, singer-songwriter, poet and editor Jacques Coetzee. Her first novel, Of Death and Beauty, was also published by Sunstone Press.

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Softcover:
6 X 9
ISBN: 978-1-63293-201-3
382 pp.,$22.95

eBook:
ISBN: 978-1-61139-527-3
382 pp.,$4.99