Book Description
The Compass Rose universe--an ancient milieu where places have no names, cities spring forth like bouquets in the desert, gods and dreams walk the scorching sands in the South, ice floats like mirror shards upon the Northern sea, islands that do not exist are found in the East, death chases a thief on the rooftops of a Western city, immortal love spans time, and directions are intertwined into one road we all travel....
You come to this place when you wonder, and sometimes, only when you dream.
From the Author
It is singularly appropriate that the word "Amarantea" and the image of a heart-wrenching island between worlds first came to me at the edge of dream. It haunted me immediately, and initiated a chemical reaction from the elements of my being. Fragments of intensity filled me--bits and pieces of unresolved curiosity, wonder, nostalgia for all things of the past, a garish swirl of mythos combining those parts of me that were steeped in ancient history of my native Armenia, Russia, and beloved Greece, the Far East. So many people, so many fates. Indeed, history spun in all directions--past, present, and future, and that uncharted realm of alternate possibilities, the fourth dimension, if you will--and I had no single term to sum it all up, no symbol that would convey everything except that of the old nautical wind rose, also known as the compass rose.
I began to write feverishly the very next day, still unsure of the directions. I was flailing with the need to convey what it was that I had seen in that one dream image. The result, so much later, fell together into a peculiar "collage" of fables that all work in tandem to illustrate the world as I see it, despite the trappings of myth. And now, I give you this story of interconnected lives, of many flavors of passion and illusion, and present it not so much as a novel as a philosophical puzzle. Find in it, if you can, a piece of yourself.
