Books by Douglas Arvidson

The Eye of the Stallion Fantasy Series

Author Douglas Arvidson discusses his writings.

I wrote these books in the belly of a sailboat on a tropical island in the western Pacific. I lived on the boat for ten years and during that time, we sailed among many of the islands of Micronesia. It was all a great adventure—a good place to be and a good place to write.

This fantasy series is about adventure, too; the adventures of a young woman and a young man, about their eternal and dangerous love, and about eternal and dangerous time. Both love and time share vagaries and moods, good and bad. They share swirling whirlpools, and the ability to stretch, to shrink, and to fold in upon themselves. Both love and time carry us, helpless, along complex and often painful paths toward a future that is never certain. For all lovers are caught up in Time’s mysteries, rushed along by its irresistible progress, heated and chilled by its ineffable fluctuations.

These books are also about peace and about war, and about eternal hate and eternal cruelty. They are about honor and justice and monstrous man creatures that live in the mountains and beautiful horses and racism and courage and cowardice. They are about a wise old man and a wise old woman who are small gods with wonderful powers. They are about magic and fate and fate’s magic and the wisdom that age, if we’re fortunate, will bring us.

I guess that’s what I wanted to do, most of all—write a series of fantasy books that are connected by the endlessness of time and of love and the wonderful, terrible things that endless time and endless love teach us if we are lucky enough to be smart and smart enough to be lucky.

Upcoming Books

The Brothers of the Fire Star: A Work in Progress

This is a novel of war and adventure. When the Japanese invade the island of Guam in December 1941, two boys, Joseph and Napu, escape by sailing away at night in a small boat.

Simply escaping the savagery of the Japanese soldiers, however, does not guarantee survival. Joseph is white and from Massachusetts while Napu is Chamorro, a brown-skinned islander from Guam. If they are to survive, they must learn to live together; to overcome their prejudices, admit their weaknesses, and have the courage to trust one another—in short, they must become brothers.

There is something else, though, something profound and mysterious: As the invasion begins, as planes are bombing the village where Joseph lives, he is caught out in the jungle, unable to return home. He seeks refuge inside the huge and all-embracing roots of a great tree—a banyan or nunu tree—a tree the islanders believe is haunted by the taotaomona, the spirits of their ancestors.

As night falls, Joseph, frightened but exhausted, falls asleep among the tree’s protecting roots only to be awakened by a procession of spirits carrying flaming torches and led by the ghost of an old man. The ghost tells him that the secrets of the ancient ocean navigators—the secrets of using the star paths to steer their canoes across oceans—have been lost to the people of Guam and Joseph must help bring them back to the island.

The Brothers of the Fire Star is a story of courage and tragedy, of desperate survival, of trust and hope and love set among the tropical islands of the western Pacific. It is a plea to keep alive the priceless secrets of ancient seafarers and how their profound connection with the earth and the sky holds great lessons for us all.

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