On the Overgrown Path -- Extended Edition

To coincide with the publication of One Who Disappeared, I’ve contracted with Vlad Verano — amazing artist and deft e-book producer — to prepare e-book versions of the previous Czech novellas, On the Overgrown Path and The Luminous Depths. In addition, I’ve expanded Overgrown Path by some seven thousand words. And happily, Jim Goddard, who brilliantly edited One Who Disappeared, has agreed to help me with the project.

When I wrote On the Overgrown Path, I had only a vague idea that it would be the first of three books, or that those books would form a rather vast novel called The Obstinates. Now that the project is complete, Overgrown Path begged for expansion — not only to broaden its chthonic undertones and point its ley lines in more helpful directions, but to incorporate the blindingly brilliant trove of material about Leoš Janácek — my Prospero — which came to light a year after my novel was published, in John Tyrrell’s magisterial biography.

Professor Tyrrell is the pre-eminent Janácek scholar (I sat quietly next to him in the Janácek archives in Brno in 2004, when he was hard at work on his masterpiece), and it's not an overstatement to say that his biography makes sense of Janácek for the very first time. Published as two beautiful tomes from Faber — The Lonely Blackbird, and Tsar of the Forests — it’s a work I’ve read and reread (and reread; let’s just say, subsumed) clarifying my understanding of the composer, and providing more than a few nuggets which seem to have a direct bearing on my invented plot. That said, I’ll be instructing Jim to remove any that seem superfluous.