About
Born to Dutch parents and raised in Colombia and England, I am a rootless wanderer with itchy feet. I've spent the last few years living and working in The Netherlands, Czech Republic, Sudan and Bulgaria, but I have every confidence that I will now finally be able to settle down in cozy old Oxfordshire.
I'm an avid reader and film fan and I have an MA in creative writing for film and television. My current projects include: 'The Ornamental Hermit '- a 19th century mystery (the second in a series of Victorian detective novels featuring DS John Billings) and 'Muchacha!' - a series of novellas depicting the life of Hans and Annie, a young Dutch couple who emigrate to Colombia in the 1970's, and struggle to find themselves a good and reliable maid.
Description
<p><strong><em>Have you ever awoken from a vivid dream and wondered which side of waking was real?</em></strong></p><p>Burt Higgins' retirement is not going well. His children have grown, and his wife has gone off to earn a late-life degree, leaving him alone in his sprawling suburban home. With too much time on his hands, he broods on the state of the world, obsessively following the worst of cable news and the Internet. Increasingly angry at the state of affairs, he nurtures a fantasy that a dark lord from another realm has foisted these problems on humankind. If only he could transport to that world, he'd confront the demon and use the magic found there to defeat the beast and end despair forever.</p><p>On a particularly bad news day, while housebound in the midst of a snowstorm, he retreats to his study to shut out the world and immerse himself in his books. When, on a whim, he lights a candle purchased in an obscure Prague curiosity shop, a magical guide appears and offers to take him on whatever quest he chooses. When he asks to become a hero in a fantasy realm, he discovers a more complex world than he expected, and battling evil with magic turns out to be far from his greatest challenge.</p><p><strong>EVOLVED PUBLISHING PRESENTS</strong> a specualtive fantasy adventure sure not just to entertain you, but to make you consider your life, your dreams, your goals. [DRM-Free]</p><h2><strong>Books by David Litwack:</strong></h2><ul><li><em>Along the Watchtower</em></li><li><em>The Daughter of the Sea and the Sky</em></li><li><em>The Time That's Given</em></li><li><em>The Children of Darkness</em> (The Seekers - Book 1)</li><li><em>The Stuff of Stars</em> (The Seekers - Book 2)</li><li><em>The Light of Reason</em> (The Seekers - Book 3)</li></ul><h2><strong>More Great Fantasy Fiction from Evolved Publishing:</strong></h2><ul><li><em>The Awakening of David Rose</em> (David Rose #1) by Daryl Rothman</li><li><em>Shadow Swarm</em> by D. Robert Pease</li><li><em>Kingdom in Chains</em> by J.W. Zulauf</li><li>The "Grims' Truth" Series by Isu Yin & Fae Yang</li></ul><p> </p>
Story Behind The Book
I spent the winter of 2009 looking after my parents' holiday house in the remote mountains of Southern Bulgaria. Somewhere in the middle of February, after some particularly heavy snow fall, I found myself completely snowed in and without electricity. I was trapped indoors with nothing but tinned food and dry crackers to feed me and a cheap, old, dog eared Wandsworth Classic to occupy my mind.
It was there, cuddled up by the fireside, wrapped in a blanket, reading Wilkie Collins's 'The Moonstone' by candlelight, that I was first inspired to write 'Death Takes A Lover'. It was the perfect setting to enjoy this classic Victorian mystery. Kardjali - a remote and forgotten corner of Bulgaria, abandoned by the young folk, littered with ruined and tumbled down homesteads, where wrinkled old ladies walk up the steep hills with their kerchief'd heads carrying heavy loads of firewood on their backs, or sit cross legged on the ground watching their cows graze the rocky fields, while their husbands drink and gamble their pensions away at the local cafe. Time had come to a standstill there (somehow it had even managed to roll back) and this bleak world of Victorian hardship and inequality which I read about, seemed more relevant to me then than anything I might have otherwise watched on television.
Time had come to a standstill for me too. I was not so young anymore and life had been leading me in the wrong direction. So before my dreams of becoming a writer had been fully frustrated, I decided to stop, take a sabbatical and go on my snowy retreat. So there, in the white and desolate Rhodopi Mountains, stuck in the past, trapped by the weather and by my own longings and yearnings and anxieties about a life half lived, the story was first conceived. It's a story about missing the boat. About hardship and inequality. About working and idling, lusting and yearning. A story about death. A story about love.
