Bruce McAllister nominated for Cybil Award!

Woo-hoo! I'm thrilled to share a bit of news I just picked up on Facebook: Bruce McAlister's magical new novel, The Village Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic, published by Aeon Press, has been nominated for the 2013 Cybil Awards. I wish my old friend Bruce--a great person and fantasy and sci-fi writer--the best of luck in the judging. For a recent review of the novel, see what the award-winning author Paul Di Filippo has to say on Locus Online.

Here’s the novel’s blurb: During the Cold War a 13-year-old American boy, Brad Lattimer, moves with his family to a fishing village in Northern Italy. It is no ordinary village. But Brad is welcomed like a long-lost cousin. His teacher is a gentle hunchback with a lisp who is more than he seems to be; and there are witches in the olive groves who will poison your cat, but not for the reasons you imagine. In those same groves there is a village so small it shouldn’t be a village, its red doorways too short for normal men to pass through easily; and at night, on its narrow cobble street, creatures that should not exist walk while a single baby cries forever. On the sands of the next cove sits a pale girl who somehow knows the poetry of the great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and wants you to drown with her, just as Percy drowned near this village over a century ago. This is the village where Brad, too, will start to dream strange dreams and write his first stories; where he will fall sick because the village’s magic has a hold on him: It wants him to become something other than a boy–something that can never leave it–something it can have as its own forever.

This is Bruce's third novel. Years ago, in another life, Bruce and I worked together at the University of Redlands, he as a professor of creative writing and me as the news bureau manager. The book is 172 pages and is available to purchase here on the Albedo One website in print for just 11.00 (euro), and can also be bought in eBook format on Amazon.com (here) and Amazon.co.uk (here).