Bring Deeps

by Elizabeth Arthur

'And now began an hour in which I fell in love so hard, so deep, that I would never climb back from the place I'd fallen to.' On their first meeting, Emrys and Sebastian fall powerfully in love with each other. Up until the moment they meet, they have found passion only in obsessions with ancient civilizations - Sebastian, an archaeologist, in the tombs of Orkney, and Emrys, an American academic, in the study of cuneiform and the civilization which produced the epic of "Gilgamesh". Now, three weeks after their meeting, Emrys leaves her long-time lover and her job in America to be with Sebastian, a man she has met only once. Their affair is intense and deeply sexual, but darkened by the secrets they keep from one another. With the fog-shrouded megaliths and the wind-blown islands of Orkney as a backdrop, the affair of kindred souls plays out to its tragic conclusion.

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Elizabeth Arthur was born on November 15, 1953 in New York City. She is the daughter of Robert Arthur, a fantasy, horror and mystery writer and the creator of The Three Investigators mystery book series for young people. She was educated at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Notre Dame University of Nelson, British Columbia, and the University of Victoria in Victoria, B.C.

Her first book, Island Sojourn - a memoir about building a house on a wilderness island in northern Canada - was published in 1980 by Harper and Row. A second memoir, Looking For The Klondike Stone, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1993. She has also published five novels - Beyond the Mountain (Harper and Row, 1983), Bad Guys (Knopf, 1986), Binding Spell (Doubleday 1989), Antarctic Navigation (Knopf, 1995), and Bring Deeps (Bloomsbury U.K., 2003).

Athur's novel Antarctic Navigation - an 800-page epic narrated by an American woman who sets out to recreate Robert Falcon Scott's British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-1912 - was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book, received a Critics' Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books, and was chosen as a Best Book of 1995 by A Common Reader. In 1996 the novel received the Ohioana Book Award for Fiction from the Ohioana Library Association.

These awards came on the heels of two NEA Fellowships, as well as an operational support grant from the Division of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation - the first ever given to a fiction writer.

Arthur has taught creative writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the University of Cincinnati, and Indiana University/Purdue University of Indianapolis - where she directed the creative writing program. She has been married to the writer and editor Steven Bauer since June of 1982, and the two of them have recently completed twenty-six books in a contemporary Three Investigators mystery book series, updated for a new generation of readers.