The Hour Before Dawn

The Hour Before Dawn is a book very close to my heart. It is one of those rare books that wrote itself…

It is on a special promotion for  the whole of September for 99p

‘A rich multi-generational sage set in Singapore and New Zealand. The mysterious diappearance of a young child sets in motion a series of events that will haunt future generations of the family..’

I was an army wife way back and living in Singapore.  To escape the heat we would head for the Rest Houses near Port Dickson on the east coast of Malaysia.The wooden beach houses with their huge pottery baths and wooden verandas facing the sea were magical.  The long beaches  of white sand were mostly deserted and framed by jungle. There was only the occasional screech of monkeys and the voices of  night fishermen working by torchlight in the dark.

There was a particularly spooky walk through  jungle paths to an old lighthouse. The hairs always used to rise up at the back of my head as the heavy silence pressed down in a myriad of little jungle sounds. Rustles and calls and breaking twigs. Often we never made the lighthouse but turned for home walking faster and faster until we reached the warmth of the sun again before the abrupt fall of night.

I had the sudden idea for this book many years later in an entirely different setting when I was visiting one of my sons in New Zealand.  I was intrigued by a painting  called ‘The Garden of the Happy Dead’ by the  Austrian painter Friedensreich Hundertwasser who lived and worked in NZ. He was fascinated by  natures natural ventilation using plants and light. In this painting  trees become natural gutters and drainpipes and all creatures return naturally to the earth to enrich it. He was way ahead of his time ecologically and in the need to protect the environment.

My story flew out of nowhere, as I sat in a house in Northland in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a different jungle… Back home,I sat down and it unwound iteself like a ribbon until I had finished…

I espcially love the French and Polish covers for The Hour Before Dawn…

The e-book  for the September promotion has a woman on the cover. https://amzn.to/3aMqnUk