Art: Peter Goodfellow

There has been some confusion about the poetry in these two books. Yes, I did write it all. After the first books I received so many compliments about the poetry that I thought I would mention my favourite volume of Chinese poems (The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, translated by David Hinton) in the acknowledgments of Gatherer of Clouds hoping to introduce some readers to the poetry of the T'ang dynasty period - some of the most wonderful poetry written in any language. The wording of this reference in the acknowledgments led some people to believe the poetry had been taken from David Hinton's translations, which it was not. Anyone familiar with the poems of Tu Fu would not mistake my poor offerings for the work of the master.

When I started writing I was under the delusion that this would be a short book - under a hundred thousand words - but the story kept growing and in the end was 450,000 words and 1,084 pages. Not that short. To my surprise and delight, I still get letters from people who are discovering these books for the first time, which is very gratifying after a decade since publication of The Initiate Brother.

The Initiate Brother and Gatherer of Clouds, along with all my other DAW titles, will be released again in February 2001.

WHSmith Online: Gatherer of Clouds
amazon.com: Gatherer of Clouds
chapters.ca: Gatherer of Clouds
amazon.co.uk: Gatherer of Clouds
borders.com: Gatherer of Clouds