PHILLIPA BOWERS – författare

Betty Barnes has been brought up by her older sister, Kate, in a small West Country village, but dreams of the bright lights of Hollywood and of being a movie star. Day dreaming is one way for Betty to escape the realities of school life where she is cruelly bullied - because Kate is living in sin with a married man and is rumoured to have used her healing skills to help more than one local girl out of trouble. Like her sister, Betty has inherited psychic and healing gifts from her forebears. She also experiences memories of an earlier time when she was the local Wise Woman, guardian of a nearby mystical cave. But when Betty gets into trouble at school, she feels that no one - not even Kate - understands her, and she runs away to the biggest city she can think of. London in the 1930s is hardly a hospitable place for a young teenage girl to find her fortune, and Betty soon finds that she cannot turn her back on her magic for ever...

Kate Barnes is fourteen years old when she first experiences the strange gifts she has inherited from her grandmother''s side of the family. She has a vivid waking dream, a memory of an earlier life centuries before in the small Somerset village of Oakey Vale, when she was murdered by an angry mob who believed her to be witch. Her grandmother decides the time is right to reveal to Kate some family secrets, including the ancient cave which houses the family tomb, over which the beautiful figure of a woman formed out of the rocks stands watch. However, just as Kate is learning to develop her second sight, her further education with her grandmother is interrupted when her father insists she return to London. He is determined that Kate forgets her grandmother''s teachings and get a job in order to help support their growing family. But, nothing will keep Kate from her destiny: to take her grandmother''s place as local wise woman and guardian of the mysterious cave.