Our Price: AUD$25.95 (USD$)* ISBN: 978-1-921456-20-6 Subject: Science Fiction Publication Date: May 2009

Synopsis
In the distant future, climate change has wreaked havoc on the world, leaving isolated communities living beneath great shields.

Ji Tao is a young peasant woman struggling to make sense of her place in the world of the Kingdom of Four Rivers, and coming to terms with the impending failure of her uncle's trading business. All of this changes when a shrewd prospector, Bao Min, offers her family the opportunity to pillage the ancestral capital of Shulao, the jewel in the crown. There they make a startling discovery in an ancient crypt, sending Ji Tao and her family on a breathtaking journey of danger and intrigue.

About The Author
Guy Salvidge was born in England in 1981 and moved with his family to Perth in 1990, at the age of eight. He won the Roy Grace English Scholarship in 1996, and the West Australian Book Council's Make Your Own Story Book Competition in 1998. In 1999 he won the Katharine Susannah Prichard Short Fiction Award (Young Writers section) and was runner up in the KSP Speculative Fiction Award (Young Writers section) in 2000.

Guy studied Creative Writing and Literature at Curtin University under such writing luminaries as Simone Lazaroo and Bruce Russell. He graduated from Curtin in 2002 with Honours. He is married and has two children, Ella and Leon, and currently lives in Northam, Western Australia, where he teaches secondary English.

The Kingdom of Four Rivers is his first novel, and he is diligently working on a second.

For more information about The Kingdom of Four Rivers and the author's other work, visit him online at guysalvidge.com or guysalvidge.wordpress.com

From The Book
What hit Ji Tao first every time was the humidity. The air was sluggish and heavy. The jungle before them seethed - it was a great wall of vegetation, a rioting entanglement of vines, creepers and branches. The jungle was bursting with life and yet was strangely silent, in the midst of a muted dream. Here the Wu was more than twenty-metres wide and rushing swiftly. On the south bank was a well-trodden path that followed the course of the Wu upriver. Travelling up that river was like voyaging into primeval murk, but that way lay Luihang.

Steam rose from tracts of mud in full sunlight; by mid-morning the sludge would have baked hard, and by late afternoon, the rain would have turned it to sludge again. The merciless sun baked the damp jungle, bringing them no joy. Even Kalliyan had climbed aboard a caravan now. For a time they continued in silence.

Ji Tao watched the dense undergrowth for signs of movement, which could spell danger even here at shield's edge. The jungle itself was virtually unexplored but not completely uninhabited. The primitive tribe in this region was reasonably friendly, but further west, along the route of the Wu, cannibalism was thought to reign. The shield-folk kept to the river...