Maria McCann
Maria McCann is an English novelist. She was born in Liverpool in 1956 and worked as a lecturer in English at Strode College, Street, Somerset since 1985, until starting work with Arden.
Her first novel, As Meat Loves Salt, was released in 2001. The story focuses on the relationship of two men, Jacob Cullen and Christopher Ferris, and is set during the English Civil War. They desert their posts in Cromwell’s New Model Army to establish a farming commune in the countryside. The novel was well received by readers and critics and has recently been championed by Orange Prize winner Lionel Shriver, but failed to attract what one could call widespread attention.
McCann also contributed a short story titled Minimal to the anthology New Writing 12 published by the British Council in 2005.
Her second novel, The Wilding, was published in February 2010 . Set in England in the 1670s, it is the story of a young cider-presser, Jonathan Dymond, his dark family secrets, and the young beggar woman he tries to help.
Source: Wikipedia
“There had been a frozen mist here, and the trees were spun into feathers. Their fragile brilliance made me wonder why, into the spotlessness of Creation, God had seen fit to introduce soiling, twisting, rampaging, Man.”
“Are you afraid of dying, Ferris?''I'm afraid of not living.”
“I wondered at him, so wise and so foolish, to have lived with me all these months and not know that the worst storms break inside a man.”
“But what virtue I do have is in me and of me. Men deny the good that comes from themselves, calling it God. So do they with their won evil, calling it the Devil.”
“Speak to me, Jacob, do not play the tyrant.Speak to me.”
“I followed him up the stairs. I was a fornicator, of unnatural appetite, in thrall to an Atheist. I repeated the words in my head and tried to feel the shock of them, but they remained strange and cruel, far removed from Ferris and me. It was simpler to say I was in love.”
“You talked once of bodily dignity.’‘I’ve seen heads shot off.”