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H.G. Parry Books

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“The wind whispered through the leaves, bringing with it the bite of late autumn. Biddy laid her hand on the branch beneath her. It seemed to her she could feel the thrum of the world's magic easier here, where the breeze from the sea made the air a living thing. It was her imagination, probably, but never mind. That was a kind of magic too. So was what waited for her on the mainland, messy and wild and glorious, waiting for her to fall into it.”

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Book:The Magician’s Daughter
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“Sometimes I think my brain opened as far as it could go when I was about seventeen, and its doors have been just stuck there ever since. And now they're ossifying and collecting cobwebs, and things are spilling in, swirling around for a bit, and then flying out again. And someday they'll start to swing slowly shut, and I'll be left in the dark with nothing but a few rustling fragments of thoughts that get thinner and weaker every time I use them. Like tea leaves. And sometimes I think I can do anything.”

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Book:The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep
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“She had tried when she turned sixteen to think of herself as a woman, like Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennet or the multitudes of heroines who lived in her books, but in her head she wasn't there. They were all older than her, and had all, even Jane, seen more of life. And yet she was too old to be Sara Crewe or Alice or Wendy Darling either. She was a liminal person, trapped between a world she'd grown out of and another that wouldn't let her in. It was one reason why she wanted to leave the island so badly--- the hope that leaving the place she'd grown up would help her leave her childhood behind. Not forever, not yet. But for a visit, to see what it was like.”

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Book:The Magician’s Daughter
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“I don't care anymore. I'm sick of hiding in the shadows." I am half sick of shadows, said the Lady of Shalott. The line flitted across Biddy's mind in Rowan's softest lilt, along with a flicker of firelight in the castle library, the sound of rain lashing outside, a cold draft through the half-open window that seemed to bring with it the promise of adventure. She had been perhaps six or seven, hearing the poem read to her for the first time. It had thrilled and spellbound her: the woman in the tower, longing for life and experience, the bold knight outside, the ebb and flow of the rhyme as relentless and inevitable as a river.”

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Book:The Magician’s Daughter
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“The ruins were no longer ruins. On the cliffs, at the highest point of the island, white towers rose to breathtaking points. As they thundered up the slope, the rest was revealed: a vast fortress, almost a citadel, its jumble of solid buildings and soaring parapets ringed by pale walls. It was clean and shining and new-made, entwined with climbing plants and trees and dark moss. In the darkness it glowed with a hundred hanging lights. She was seeing the island as it had been thousands of years ago, under an ancient moon. This was the lost civilization of Hy-Brasil.”

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Book:The Magician’s Daughter
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“The room was curved, wide, and empty except for one enormous rock in the center. Easily twice Biddy's height, it glowed with faint green-gold shimmers beneath its smooth surface. She had seen that light before. Flashes of it in the old oak, when Rowan drew magic through the skin of the tree. And once, in the scrying glass, as a glow on the wall illuminating Rowan as he lay in enchanted sleep in an underground room. This was it, the room where Rowan had come to steal magic on the night he had nearly never come home. The vault, he had called it. The place where the Council hoarded its wealth like fairy gold.”

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“As a child, she was curious about the world beyond the sea, but in a vague, half-sketched way, as she was curious about a lot of things she read in books. London and Treasure Island and horses and dragons were all equally imagined to her. She thought she would probably see them one day, when she was old. In the meantime, the island was hers to explore, and it took up more time than she could ever imagine having. There were books to read, thousands of them in the castle library, and Rowan brought back more all the time. There were trees to climb, caves along the beach to get lost in, traces of the fair folk who had once lived on the island to find and bring home. There was work to be done: Food needed to be grown and harvested; the livable parts of the castle, the parts that weren't a crumbling ruin, needed to be combed for useful things when the tide went out. She was a half-wild thing of ink and grass and sea breezes, raised by books and rabbits and fairy lore, and that was all she cared to be.”

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Book:The Magician’s Daughter
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“Her eyes opened at the touch of light. It was slanting light, golden and shimmering with dust, the kind that filtered through the forests on Hy-Brasil in the late afternoon. And yet when she stepped forward, she found she was no longer amid the trees but inside, at the center of a circular tower that extended up for as far as her eyes could stretch. The walls were the white of polished marble, and the floor beneath her feet was polished wood partially covered by a thick red rug. There was a fireplace with two worn armchairs, and a desk fitted to the curve of the room and strewn with papers. Everything else, every inch of towering wall, was filled with bookshelves. They went all the way up to the high ceiling, at least seven stories, connected by ladders and balconies and ledges. The place had the old-paper smell of Rowan's study at the castle. Biddy stared, barely noticing as Hutchincroft jumped from her arms. "It's a library," she said out loud, in wonder. "It's a library inside a tree.”

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Book:The Magician’s Daughter
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“It was quiet as I settled in to read alongside Sherlock Holmes and David Copperfield. But for the crackle of the fire and the ever-present whistle of the wind outside, it was as quiet as it had been in the city, after everything changed. And for a moment, the space between heartbeats, I felt I could glimpse the world Charley saw. A world of light and shadow, of fact, truth and story, each blurring into one another as sleep and wakefulness blur in the early morning. The moments of our lives unfolding as pages in a book. And everything connected, everyone joined, by an ever-shifting web of language, by words that caught us as prisms caught light and reflected back at ourselves.”

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Book:The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep
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