A lonely hen. A wandering rooster. An old man on a quiet French farm. And a mysterious tree placed center among all. A fairy tale for adults - an enchanting exploration of meaning in the burden of time, the possible in dreams, the lessons of silence, the clarity of love, and the miraculous in life.
The Songe of If (The Gift) begins with a tale. It is a legend of a priest who comes to this land after his promised life fails him and he seeks refuge and redemption by sharing his faith. Before his death, he plants a tree to carry forth a message to those yet to come. But after centuries of deprivation and despair, the tree leaves its place, seeking a home and a chance for renewal. The home the tree finds is on a small farm. And with the tree at its center, the farm and the lives it contains begin a wondrous transformation.
Told as fable and as fact, the story is a combination of fantasy, romance, and philosophical fiction, written in the tradition of the imagined, oral lore from a long-lost age in Southwest France.
Pierrick Euston is a writer based primarily in a small town on either side of the English Channel. His father, an English woolen lacemaker, and his mother, who wrote excessively about the influence of medieval French philosopher Peter Abelard on the modern French thinker Jean Baudrillard, were professional peripatetics. In their spare time, they divided Pierrick's education at home and in schools while touring breweries, monasteries, and vineyards throughout Europe.Having an early fascination with dendrochronology and hermeneutics, Pierrick would later pursue these interests by concentrating his studies at university in the fields of ornithology, the Avignon Papacy, and the sunflowers of Bordeaux. After successfully graduating Fere Cum Laude, he pursued a prolific career writing short epic poetry in Lancashire and Aquitaine. It was during these years that he committed his energies to memorizing the slurred legends overheard at various pubs and bistrauds and applying them to his frequent rereading of Russian literature, The Three Musketeers, and existentialism. He is currently perusing every other volume in The Human Comedy and drinking 24½ cups of coffee each day as he believes he is not half-as-great a Frenchman as Balzac.Pierrick began writing The Songe of If after wandering England's Lake District before finding brief and melancholic refuge on an isolated, French farm, his days unexpectedly brought alive by the solemnity of playful chickens, their predicament before him casting reflections of purpose and the certainty of fate. From the lessons they shared, this story was born, hewn from the remnants of tales that will forever survive, floating as they do between the incessant bluster of life and the consoling sweet silence in the shadows of dreams.
