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At the close of the violent twentieth century, Octavia Chavez is an artist beset by contradictions. Repelled by human cruelty, and sensing the impending extinction of wilderness, she nevertheless wants to put something into the world that inspires awe and wonder rather than horror and argument. And it turns out that, in the face of such a fierce challenge, the intellect is not much help at all. As Octavia discovers, "you cannot escape the dark work of staring into your own soul." Her only guides in this enterprise are a white wolf that no one else can see, and her faithful but exasperating friend Raho, who keeps challenging her to answer an impossible question: "What is the face of the coming guest?" Torn between her rage and her longing for emptiness, Octavia will have to brave the outer limits of her own endurance in order to find expression, and to reach a place of stillness in the midst of loss and uncertainty. In this, the third book in her New Mexico trilogy, Grenfell Fairhead turns inward. She challenges us to follow Octavia on her perilous journey of self-discovery, and also challenges us to confront the pressing difficulties of our own time with compassionate but fierce attention. Includes Reading Guide
About the author
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 previous novels, Of Death and Beauty and Whereof One Cannot Speak, were also published by Sunstone Press.
