New Title, New Cover, Same Tale.

First there was A Time For Silence, my domestic noir novel set in the present day and in the North Pembrokeshire of the 1930s and 40s. Who killed John Owen and why was no one caught? A moody blue cover with a photo of a cottage very near me.

Then there was The Covenant, an historical mystery set between the 1880s and the end of World War I, a prequel to A Time For Silence. Why was John Owen what he was and what made him that way. An ominous red cover of… a cottage near me. Reasonable enough, as it was the cottage, as I first chanced upon it, just two fields beyond my garden, which inspired the whole saga.

And finally there was Before The Silence, which is cheating, I know, because it is the same book as The Covenant, but this version is for Kindle, with a moody blue image of the same cottage from a different angle. I should say that the title, The Covenant, along with the red cover remain in the paperback version.

Why the change? Mainly, I think, to make it clearer that the book is very much a prequel to A Time For Silence, a reverse continuation (does that make sense?) of the same complicated story of the Owen family of Cwmderwen, with its 24 acres, 1 rood and 8 perches and unforgiving land. John Owen didn’t appear out of nowhere.  A family had created him, and it also created the aunt who raised him: Leah Owen, spinster daughter of the grand patriarch, Thomas Owen. A girl who could achieve great things, if the family’s obsessive commitment to the land God allotted to the Owens didn’t threaten to drag her down into darkness. Some bonds have to be broken, whatever the cost.

Leah has vanished from the scene a long time before the dual stories told in A Time For Silence, but she does get a mention in it. Deep in the graveyard at Beulah chapel is the Owen family stone that records her name. Easily overlooked, except to an eagle-eyed reader, but then Leah, like other women of her time, was easily overlooked. But not so easily dismissed.

Before The Silence