Press Release on The Academician

After 30 Year in the Making, Patterson's The Academician is to be released on March 9th

The author of Jade Owl Legacy Series, Edward C. Patterson, is releasing the first book in the Southern Swallow Series - The Academician on March 9th, 2009. This novel of 12th Century China, the product of 30 years work. is a real eye-opener.

The Academician - Book I of Southern Swallow

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRLog (Press Release) – Mar 02, 2009 – The Academician is to be published by the author of The Jade Owl Series, Edward C. Patterson:

“A bigger fool the world has never known than I — a coarse fellow with no business to clutch a brush and scribble. I only know the scrawl, because my master took pleasure in teaching me between my chores. Not many men are so cursed . . .” Thus begins the tale of Li K’ai-men as told by his faithful, but mischievous servant, K’u Ko-ling — a tale of 12th Century China, where state service meant a life long journey across a landscape of turmoil and bliss. A tale of sacrifice, love, war and duty — a fragile balance between rituals and passions. An epic commitment between two men to define the indefinable in their own world and time. Here begins the legacy of the Jade Owl and its custodian as he holds true to his warrants.

The Academician is the first of four books in the Southern Swallow series, capturing the turbulence of the Sung Dynasty in transition. Spanning the silvery days under the Emperor Hui to the disasters that followed, The Academician is a slice of world events that should never have been forgotten. Still, there are things more important than invasions and empires. The world’s fate rests in the warrants of Li K’ai-men, this young scholar from Gui-lin, called master by his faithful servant, but known as Nan Ya to the world."

The Academician is a fictional account of a twelfth Century Chinese scholar-official, who readers of The Jade Owl Legacy first encounter in The Third Peregrination. Although this series serves as an historical adjunct to The Jade Owl, it has been in development longer than any work from the author's pen. The character of Li K’ai-men first came to light over three decades ago in Patterson's first China-themed work, Vagrant Hollow, a work which, unlike Li, will never come to light. Still, Mr. Patterson's great desire to novelize a seminal epoch in Chinese History, the founding of the Southern Sung Dynasty, sprang to life even earlier in his Masters’ thesis, "The Restoration of the Southern Sung Dynasty: The Reign of the Emperor Kao-tsung: 1127 – 1167." While entrenched in this period’s amazing details, Patterson visualized the tug and tussle of events that every Chinese school child knows, but few in the West can fathom.