Jane Johnson
aka Jude Fisher, Gabriel King (with M. John Harrison)
Jane Johnson is from Cornwall and has worked in the book industry for 20 years, as a bookseller, publisher and writer.
She was responsible for publishing the works of J R R Tolkien during the 1980s and 1990s and worked on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, spending many months in New Zealand with cast and crew. Under the pseudonym of Jude Fisher she wrote three bestselling Visual Companions to the films. She has also written several books for children.
In 2005 she was in Morocco researching the story of a distant family member who was abducted from a Cornish church in 1625 by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery in North Africa (which formed the basis for Crossed Bones / The Tenth Gift), when a near-fatal climbing incident caused her to rethink her future.
She returned home, gave up her office job in London, sold her flat and shipped the contents to Morocco. In October she married her own 'Berber pirate' and now they split their time between Cornwall and a village in the Anti-Atlas Mountains.
She still works, remotely, as Fiction Publishing Director for HarperCollins.
“Cat wrinkled her nose. "No, thank you.""Take," the rais told her. "Is good." He picked one up and held it out, and when she hesitated, thrust it at her with greater insistence. "With my people, hosbitality important. To refuse is insult."She took a small bite. Sweetness flooded her mouth so that she gasped. It was not in the least what she had expected, for it tasted remarkably like the preserved medlars the cook bottled each autumn from Kenegie's orchard. "Oh..." She took the rest whole, saliva breaking from the corner of her mouth.Al-Andalusi looked on, eyebrow cocked sardonically. "Is fig," he said. "In some tradition it was the friut Eve gave to Adam from the Tree of Knowledge.""In the Bible that was an apple!""In our tradition, according to the Qu'ran, it was apple also. And when Adam swallowed mouthful od fruit, it stuk in throat and made lump all men have.""The Adam's apple!" Cat cried, astonished. "We call it that as well.""We are, perhaps, not such strangers to each other as you think.”
“Somewhere a bird sang, its chant hanging plaintive and melancholy in the still air...I think it's a sort of lark or something. Our tradition has it that they sing with the voices of lost lovers. If the stars are smiling on them, you will hear its mate call back in a moment.”
“There are days when I think there really is some huge great tapestry of a plan out there and we're all woven into it - this fabulous, complex pattern of life and death, full of recurring motifs and waves of color, and we're each one tiny thread in the weave.”