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A chat with author, artist, and storyteller E.C. Hibbs about the first book in her new Nightland Quartet, The Shade Between Shadows.
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Amazon Links for The Shade Between Shadows
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About the Book
I didn’t think myself truly silent. I possessed a voice, as sure as any other. It was simply not the same as any other I had met.
The year is 1838. Queen Victoria has ascended the throne. And within the United Kingdom lies Nightland: a sprawling forest filled with darkness and danger.
Beatrice has always been different. She has not spoken since childhood, communicates through drawings, and hates to be touched. And she is a grey: half-English and half-Nightlander.
When she is forced into servitude across the border, she hatches a plan to escape with siblings Anselm and Gretchen. But gaining her freedom will be no simple task, for first, she must unravel the secrets of her master, Prince Edward. A man rumoured to have murdered his wife — and who shares Beatrice’s ability to see people’s souls.
About E.C. Hibbs
E.C. Hibbs was born by the sea in Cheshire, northwest England, which she describes at “a quaint little corner of the world that folks might know thanks to a certain grinning cat.” Her village was only a street long, filled with Victorian cottages and encased in woodland. She was brought up around a log fire, on a steady diet of fairy tales and a huge collection of books.
When she was twelve, she completed my first novel. She says, “It sucked. A lot. But it sowed the seeds of a distant dream. In a childhood which was both beautiful and dark, words were an anchor. needed to make sense of the tangle of thoughts in my head; breathe life into the fantasies I saw. Writing was a way for me to both escape the world and make sense of it.”
Emma attended the University of Chester, studying animal behaviour, specializing in marine and polar ethology and ecology, working with more than eighty species of animals—everything from rabbits to rhinos—and eventually gaining a master’s degree in Wildlife Conservation. But all the while, she was writing stories.
The same week she graduated with her BSc (Hons), her debut novel, Blindsighted Wanderer was published. Then she jumped on a plane and headed to Finland. It marked the beginning of her winters inside the Arctic Circle, once again surrounded by woods and huddled around a log fire, in another village barely a street long. It became her second home: a place which seemed to be woven from magic and myth. She spent the next few years between there and England, always writing, always creating.
Now, she says, “my life is a wonderful balance of all the things I love the most. I spin novels and short stories, write calligraphy for heritage books, and give talks on the history of fairy tales. Thanks to a photographic memory, I’m also a traditional storyteller, with over 1000 performances under my belt, in front of such names as Ed Byrne, Colleen Rooney, and James McAvoy. On top of that, I’m a 2nd Dan black belt in Shotokan karate, and I helped to break a Guinness World Record on the world’s biggest catwalk.”
She concludes, “My path has certainly been interesting so far, with its share of both light and dark. But it’s my path, and I choose to own it. It’s not always made it easy to fit in, but that’s never bothered me. I still see the world with a sense of childlike wonder and hope I never lose that. So I’ll carry on creating, exploring reality through a lens of fantasy, expressing myself in the silent language of words and stories.
“And now, I can share that vision with you: with everyone who doesn’t fit the mould, who finds magic and adventure in every question they ask.”
