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Calypso Dreaming was published by HarperCollins (2002)
Sweetholm is a small island sheltering in the Bristol channel, best known for its colonies of seabirds and seals and the picturesque ruins of St Brigan's Priory. When Geoff and Hilary Robinson are offered the opportunity to caretake a house there for the summer, they see it as a perfect opportunity to work at patching up their marriage. Their teenage daughter Tansy also welcomes it as a chance to put behind her her unnerving and unsuccessful experiments in magic in Bristol. But troubles cannot be so easily outrun and Sweetholm is not the idyllic retreat it apears to be. It is one of the 'frayed places of the world' where the line between ordinary life and ancient magic has become wafer thin. And key to these events is Calypso herself-a strange child whose round lidless eyes and webbed feet hint at her ancestry. Her prophetic dreams have power - but will anybody dare to understand the truth?
"...the island's atmosphere is powerfully conveyed: beauty and danger, changeable weather and tides, the past's long shadows." (Linda Newbery in the TES)
"Skilfully and dramatically interweaving the destinies of Tansy and Calypso with those of the island's adult community, Butler shows how painfully close the real and the supernatural can be." (Robert Dunbar in the Irish Times)
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