Wild Talent

Wild Talent: a Novel of the Supernatural is the strange tale of Jeannie Guthrie, a sixteen-year-old Scottish farm worker, who possesses a frightening talent. Believing that she has unintentionally killed her ne’er-do-well cousin, her fear of being sentenced as a witch propels her to flee her home to London. There, Guthrie is befriended by the free-spirited and adventurous Alexandra David, and introduced to Madame Helena Blavatsky’s famous salon where she begins to understand the source of her strange powers.

With detailed action sequences Kernaghan engages her readers as Jeannie and Alexandra venture from the late Victorian world of spiritualists and theosophists; to the fin de siecle Paris of burgeoning artists, anarchists and esoteric cults; and finally to the perilous country of the Beyond.

It is against these eerie late 19th century backdrops that Kernaghan weaves an accessible tale of myth and magic, while at the same time addressing the serious and relevant issues of trust, conviction, and power.

AUTHOR

Eileen Kernaghan

Wild Talent: a novel of the supernatural is Kernaghan’s eighth book in the historical fantasy genre. The Snow Queen ((Thistledown, 2001)), won the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award, the Aurora, for best speculative novel in English, and was short listed by the Canadian Library Association for Best Children’s Book of the Year. The Alchemist’s Daughter ((Thistledown 2004)) was shortlisted for the Sheila Egoff Prize for Children’s Literature and the Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice award. The experimental Dance of the Snow Dragon, a young adult fantasy novel with a Tibetan Buddhist background, was published in 1995 by Thistledown Press. In addition to her fantasy novel work, Kernaghan’s poems and short stories have appeared in many North American publications, both mainstream and speculative. Eileen Kernaghan lives in New Westminster, British Columbia.