AMANDA HALE’s first novel, Sounding the Blood, was a Fiction finalist for the BC Relit Awards and was voted one of the top ten novels of 2001 by Toronto’s Now Magazine. Hale has published two more novels – The Reddening Path, and My Sweet Curiosity, and a collection of short stories – In the Embrace of the Alligator: short fictions from Cuba. Her poetry and award-winning fiction have appeared in numerous literary magazines. She has written a screenplay adaptation of Sounding the Blood. The New York Times Book Review calls Sounding the Blood "an ambitious, utterly convincing historical novel . . . " "Like Melville, Hale makes prose poetry out of the bloody particulars of our encounter with the largest of mammals, gives ancestral depth and lyric grace to human losses and desires. " – Keith Harrison, author of Furry Creek.