Fifteen years ago I sat down in the house I shared with my soon-to-be wife in Charlottesville, Virginia, and read a story in Farley Mowat’s Sea of Slaughter that changed my life.  In the early days of colonial America, Mowat wrote, a crew of eggers searching for Northern Atlantic nesting grounds   had found a young woman living alone among birds and “white” bears on a small, rocky island.  Mowat’s book was about rapacious hunting and fishing, so he was mostly interested in the auks and in fact that polar bears lived almost as far south as Newfoundland.

But I couldn’t get my mind off the woman.  Who she was, why she’d been abandoned…the questions were impossible to shake.  When I sat down to read I’d been a third-year graduate student in archaeology, but when I stood back up I was determined to become a historical novelist; this, I thought, was the story I wanted to tell.

Now, ten years after the novel’s first publication as Strange Saint, the e-book revolution has given authors incredible new tools and control over their work, inspiring me to revise Strange Saint for electronic release.  During the process I came to see e-books and paper books as closely related, but nevertheless distinct, formats, and even though my edits were largely cosmetic I decided that the changes warranted a fresh start for the novel.   Newly titled The Windcatcher, it’s available for the next two days as a free Kindle e-book.

Edits and formatting aside, the heart of the book remains Melode.  She fascinated me before I had any idea who she was; she still does today, and it’s a joy to be able to release her story.  I hope you’ll take the chance to download the novel while the promotion is on, and that you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.