Now you are in the true world, and a great deal more is required of you. Here you must befriend real wolves, and lure real birds down from the sky. Here you must endure real people around you, and we are not uniformly kind; we are damaged and impulsive, each in our own way. It is harder. It is not safe. But it is what you were born to.

You are pure-hearted and lovely, and you have never done a moment's wrong. But you are a living creature, born to make a real life, however it cracks your heart.

OTHERBOUND is a web of spells and counterspells, but Corinne Duyvis never loses sight of the bodies, minds and all-too-human emotions that absorb the impact of the magical power-plays. It's an action-packed tale of passion, possession and hair-raising leaps from world to world. As you read it, remember to keep breathing.

There is something about talking in the night, with the shreds of sleep around your ears, with the silences between one remark and another, the town dark and dreaming beyond your own walls. It draws the truth out of you, straight from its little dark pool down there, where usually you guard it so careful, and wave your hands over it and hum and haw to protect people's feelings, to protect your own . . . You can bring out the jaggedest feelings - if you are my wife and know how to state them calm - into the night quiet. They will float there for consideration, harming no one.

How different other families were, the shape of them, the things they presumed, the children that grew up in them.

It was one thing not to want a husband, I realized; it was quite another not to need one for the roof over your head, for your meat and bread, for the shoes on your feet and the coat on your back.

I felt freed to please myself, to find my way as I would, in a world that was much vaster than I had realized before, in which I was but one star-gleam, one wavelet, among multitudes. My happiness mattered not a whit more than the next person's - or the next fish's, or the next grass-blade's! - and not a whit less.