Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #308871 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 352 pages

From the Back Cover
On the planet Monde D'Isle a rugged human-descended people live in union with their world. They migrate with the tides of the moon, sense the meridians of the planet and slip into a Dreamtime that grants them access to - and escape from - the darker urges of their animal nature. But Mevennen is out of tune with her people's bloodmind and fears for her life during the time of the hunt, when her people seek out the weakest as their prey. And she seems haunted by a ghost.

Now an expedition has arrived on Monde D'Isle, charged with bringing utopia to this lost colony. The "ghost" is anthropologist Shu Idaan Gho and she promises to heal Mevennen - but it is a promise that comes with a price the whole world must pay. And why should the world want to?

The Ghost Sister was first published in the US in 2001 to immediate acclaim: it was a New York Times Notable Book of 2001, it was nominated for the Philip K. Dick and the Spectrum Awards (Best Novel), and in the UK it was on the shortlist for BSFA best novel.

About the Author
Liz Williams is the daughter of a conjuror and a Gothic novelist, and currently lives in Brighton, England. She has a PhD in philosophy of science from Cambridge. Her novels The Ghost Sister, Empire of Bones, The Poison Master and Nine Layers of Sky are or will be published in the US by Bantam Spectra. She has had short fiction published in Asimov's, Interzone, The Third Alternative and Realms of Fantasy, among others, and is co-editor of the recent anthology Fabulous Brighton. Her short fiction has featured in the 16th Year's Best SF anthology, with honourable mentions in subsequent Year's Best for SF and Fantasy. Her short story 'Adventures in the Ghost Trade' was shortlisted for a BSFA Award in 2001. She is also the current secretary of the Milford UK SF Writers' Workshop.

Excerpted from Ghost Sister by Liz Williams. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue

Eleres ai Mordha, journal

It was the summer before my second migration, the summer in which Sereth killed the child, that I finally learned to hate and fear my own nature. And although it was so bitter at the time, I am glad that I wrote down what happened to us all, so that I can remember. Now that I am an old man, my memories slip by like drops of rain into the sea; I am neither satahrach nor shadowdrinker, and there are days when even my given name slides from my mind. I have to stare down at my hands, at the tattooed symbols which have become as blurred as my memory, learning myself all over again, as a child does when it is come newly home. Sereth's name swims up from the fading pages of my manuscript, and so do those of my ghost-sister Mevennen, and Morrac and Jheru, but I find it hard sometimes to recall their faces, or who they really were. They run together, merging and changing. I remember Mevennen's death and then, with a catch of the heart, I realise that it was not Mevennen who died, not then, but Sereth, or maybe someone else. And I have to go back to the journal, and read all over again what really happened - or at least, what I and others wrote down. There are so many of the beloved dead, and if my fading memory signals that I am taking my first steps on the road to join them, I will not be too sorry. I have seen more than seven migrations; I am close to a century now. I have been to lost Outreven and back again, and I have spoken with ghosts. I have lived a long time, and the world is changing. Yet perhaps all who are old say such things, refusing to see that it is not the world that has changed, but they themselves.

Customer Reviews

Haunted by the bloodmind
This is another complex vision of two worlds, meeting in mutual incomprehension. It is completely different in both tone and content from Empire of Bones, but equally excellent and absorbing.

Themes include moral responsibility, the nature of consciousness, the problem with anthropology, subjectivity versus objectivity, the observer affecting the observed etc. There are also two conflicting versions of Gaianism, which reflects contemporary issues about the best way to interact with our own planet.

Liz Williams manages to deal with profound issues in a subtle & non-didactic way. The characters play out their drama with a sense of tragic inevitability, but the involvement of the offworld anthropologist affects both them and her. The technology is convincing as well.

I loved the ideas in this book - the way the people of Mondhile interact with their landscape, the descriptions of their world and its history. The multiple-perspective narrative is great too, because you get the viewpoints of all the different characters. Highly recommended.