THE LAURENTINE SPY - EMILY GEE

PUBLISHER: SOLARIS

JACKET TEXT:

The Corhonase citadel is a place of virtue and debauchery -- and deadly secrets. For the Laurentine spies embedded there, every day brings danger. Nothing is as it seems, whether in the ballrooms and salons of the nobles' court or the catacombs beneath the citadel.

Saliel has many secrets; her spying is one, her past as a pickpocket in Laurent's slums is another, but her most deeply guarded secret is the magic she possesses. She walks a narrow path between discovery as a spy and being burned as a witch.

With a sadistic Spycatcher closing in, Saliel and her fellow spies are tested to the limits of heir endurance. In the fight to stay alive they must trust each other -- or die. Magic may be their only hope of survival...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

I grew up in a house full of words and books: my mother worked as a librarian and a proof-reader, and my father was a writer.

Every day Dad would go down to the little room he'd built under the house and work on his latest book. If he was writing a children's fantasy, he'd read the manuscript aloud to my sister and me. Those were marvellous evenings--curled up on the sofa listening to another chapter.

In primary school I wrote lots of stories; in secondary school I didn't. English became my least favourite subject and I dropped it as soon as I could. Nothing would have made me take English at university!

I had no intention of becoming a writer. Ever. I got a science degree, I spent several years travelling and working overseas, and one day I was sitting on a bus in Syria, with the desert stretching in all directions, and I thought, What if...

Many years have passed since then, but that what if eventually turned into a manuscript, and then another, and another.

Currently I work in the wine industry, and I write.

I've been a rehabilitation instructor, a library assistant, a postie, a waitress on the Isle of Skye, and even (briefly) a field assistant in Antarctica. I love to travel and have lived in Sweden, backpacked in Europe, and journeyed overland in the Middle East, China, and North Africa. Most recently I've lived in Marlborough, New Zealand.