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Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowi erer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. And those pryf are a gas.Īn unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.īased on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. A heated romance and chase in a splashy, scary setting. By the close, there have deaths of varying nastiness (how about being ground between walls and a pryf?)-and a lovers' escape. The chase is lengthy and studded with such elements as: the strategy and antics of the allied ``Quicken-tree'' people, of ancient (perhaps faerie?) origins struggles through caves of ice and utter darkness fantastic beauty and horror the pryf (giant sea worms) and a magic door leading to the sea.
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A ruse, planned by Dain, derails his pursuit, and the pair escape, on the way becoming lovers in some luxuriously steamy scenes. Mutual uninterest, even dislike, evolves into a fascination with the delicious complexities of each other. The sorcerer Dain, who works his ``magic'' in a tower of the castle, has no interest in Ceridwen but hates Caradoc, and so rescues the girl and begins to heal her. There, she's derisively tortured and displayed. When she's mature, Ceridwen is affianced to Caradoc but flees into the forest, where she's captured and taken to the Castle Wydehaw. The children are whisked away by a Druid's daughter and sent to be raised in the homes of devout Christians. In the Prologue, two small children, the boy Mychael and his twin sister Ceridwen, are lost in the caves beneath the castle of Carn Merioneth as their mother, descendent of a priestess, is about to perform a rite to ``open the door between worlds.'' But then death and horror arrive in the terrifying person of the vicious Caradoc, ``the Boar,'' who kills all and becomes the new lord of Carn Merioneth.
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A first hardcover in which a love affair of erotic discovery and passion is staged against a background of horror and ancient rites in 12th-century Wales-and brought to a gripping conclusion in a chase through fantastic underground caverns.