The Twelfth Strand

The Twelfth Strand is the story of an oddly incongruous love affair between two remarkable people, Henry Cadence and Eva Chakluak. It is also a kind of owner's manual for life on earth, offering an explanation for one of the most baffling mysteries of humankind. Exactly how, and perhaps more importantly, when did Homo Sapiens make their startlingly rapid, almost overnight, cultural leap from primitive, cave-dwelling, hunter-gatherers to intellectually advanced creators of complex architecture, art, science, and language?

The answer lies in another question, a disarmingly simple question of The Twelfth Strand, 'What do you love?'

Henry Cadence was an astronaut in the late summer of 1969 who experienced a profoundly life-altering close encounter while onboard the moon-orbiting Apollo 11. He fell back to earth forever changed and possessing an uncanny relationship with the living spirits of machinery.

Eva Chakluak, a recently-widowed Inuit woman now living in Homestead, Florida, having inherited a threadbare traveling circus from an abusive Russian husband, has need of a good mechanic. She hires Henry Cadence, a cheerfully accentric drifter, to keep her singular little world in good running repair.

Its a love made in heaven.

With only one slight problem.

Henry, it seems, has this peculiar, and unpredictable tendency of slipping back into the deep river of distant time. Lately he's been to ancient Egypt, 1,300 years before the birth of Christ to be exact. The boy-king, Tutankhamen, has recently died, victim of some unknown disease, maybe choked on a peach pit, or perhaps even murdered by political rivals.

The grieving Egyptians look to their Solar God for guidance, a god who appears unexpectedly from the desert, a god who seems to know things about the future, a god named Henry . . .

Phil Austin, born in Hartford, CT in 1953 has lived on Nantucket, Island for the past twenty years with his wife Ursula, son Robin, and an alarming number of tame animals. He has been a blues singer, a Native American rights activist, a theatre designer, and housewright. His magical realism tales of angels, aliens, and the everyday saints among us all speak of the invariable goodness of humankind. His first novel, On Bethel Ridge, a Christmas fable published in 1998, was hailed as 'a sharply etched tale reaching across cultures with a universal spirituality.'