E A Underwood
Liz Underwood was born in London but has since kept moving west. She grew up as a teenager on Exmoor wandering on the hills with pony and dog, went back east briefly to study for a History Degree at the University of Reading but couldn’t resist the pull of the West Country and returned there to marry a saddle maker. They now share fourteen acres and a quirky old farmhouse on the Blackdown Hills with their two dogs. While some of their little patch is dedicated to food production much of it is a managed wilderness that is home to several setts full of badgers, earths of foxes, deer, owls, bats, kingfishers and otters, the occasional cormorant and a pair of cranky ravens amongst a plethora of other creatures.
When not growing, picking and processing their produce, Liz can often be found rambling about with a camera or sitting in a glade full of bluebells with a notebook and pen, that is if it’s not raining too hard.
E A Underwood's Books
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Isles of the Earthbound
28 Sep 2024Circa 500 AD. Daring seafarers from the West Coast of Scotland have made a voyage of discovery deep into the Atlantic to a land they name Tìr-ùr. Bountiful, verdant, seemingly empty and ripe for the taking. That is until they encounter the earthbound, a race possessed of some characteristics the colonists find profoundly unsettling.
Off the coast of this new land, on the fortress island of Tèarmann, a young woman, Fìrinn, awaits her arranged marriage to Amrhan, a charming and fascinating nobleman newly arrived from the distant homeland. The only child of the leader of the settlers and his earthbound wife, Fìrinn is unsure of her place in the world. When she discovers some disturbing truths about her husband-to-be, she is compelled to flee Tèarmann, seeking refuge with her mother’s people.
Isles of the Earthbound is the story of a defiant young woman forced to make crucial choices, but also a powerful evocation of the natural world in all its aspects, both the joyful and the terrible.
E A Underwood lives on a smallholding in the Blackdown Hills in Somerset. When not writing stories or growing food, she can be found wandering along rivers, across the moors, in the woods or by the sea. Always fascinated by stories of mythical lands, Isles of the Earthbound is her first novel and the result of musings on what might have happened if our ancestors had actually discovered such a place.