Karen Mercury knew she wanted to be a writer while sitting on her bed in Lucas Valley, California, at the age of 4, gazing at The Bee Man Of Orn. She thought, what power there is in creating imaginary worlds! The reader is automatically transported into a reality that you created. He hears your characters talking; he sees the vistas you painted with words.

Then she realized she had best teach herself to read, so she could understand what was in the book she held.

When Karen was 12, she had a dream of being in a village on the coast of Kenya, so at 23 she bought a one-way plane ticket to Nairobi to find the village. She climbed the Mountains of the Moon in Rwanda, hitchhiked overland through Uganda, Zaire, and Zambia, lived with the Turkana in the Northern Frontier District of Kenya, went down the Congo on a decrepit steamer, and went up the Nile on a leaky dhow.

Her obsession with precolonial African history comes from decades poring over the writings of explorers Burton, Stanley, Livingstone, Grant, Baker, and Brazza. Victorian Africa was an era when the most outlandish things were possible, and did indeed happen. It was a time of grand gestures, acts of heroism, dramatic scenes of violence, and above all the endurance, valor and passion that drove the scientists, missionaries, and traders who were drawn to Africa.

Karen lives in Northern California with her husband and her bronze Newfoundland.

Web Site: www.karenmercury.com

The Four Quarters Of The World	Strangely Wonderful