UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR
Susan Kay
Susan Kay was born on 1952 in Manchester, England. She worked as a primary school teacher until leaving to bring up a family, and now lives with her husband and two children in Cheshire. Her first novel was Legacy, about the life of Queen Elizabeth I and won a Georgette Heyer Historical Novel Prize and a Betty Trask Award in 1985. Her second novel was Phantom, which expands upon the history of Erik, the hideous, brilliant character from Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera, and won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association in 1991.
I stood on the lip of the southern borehole, clutching a service line, and, for the first time in my life, stared beyond the mass of Thistledown at the stars.
— from Legacy
Most acclaimed
Legacy
In this sequel to EON, Greg Bear continues to explore the possibilities presented by the asteroid Thistledown, a remnant of a lost human civilization. The Way is a tunnel through space and time that leads to other worlds, some more like planet Earth than Earth itself. It is perhaps the most formidable discovery in Thistledown and with such an important discovery comes dispute as to the nature of the Way and how it should be used. The Way can only be reached through Axis City, the only space station of Thistledown. The ruling body of Axis City, the Hexamon, has decreed that other worlds reached by The Way must be left untouched as an insurance against future needs of the human race. But then the Hexamon hear of a group of clandestine colonists who have settled in one of the new worlds. Olmy Ap Sennon is an eager young career soldier who must go and investigate this illegal colony, and at the same time confront his own humanity. As he witnesses the hardship and beauty of the outlaw human colony, he learns what it means to struggle with war, ecological disasters, love, and death.
Phantom
"In this novel, Susan Kay re imagines Gaston Leroux's famous novel "The Phantom of the Opera" in greater depth and detail. "Phantom" begins with a young widow giving birth to her only child. The child's face is severely deformed, and despite the signs of genius he shows from his early days, she cannot bring herself to love him. The child, Erik's, childhood is spent longing for the love of a mother whose only gift to him was a mask. Eventually Erik runs away and joins a circus freak show. The cruel owners capitalize off his hideous face and his hauntingly beautiful singing. After leaving the circus, Erik becomes an apprentice to a stone mason, and experiences an adolescent crush on the mason's daughter, but after his appearance inadvertently causes a terrible tragedy, he escape once again, this time to Persia, and the queens court. Finally, tired of the world's rejection, Erik helps to design the Paris Opera House, complete with a cavernous and labyrinthine basement, where he intends to live out the rest of his days. It is here that he encounters, Christine, a young soprano with whom he falls in love. " (