Hello there! Let’s begin with the usual and corny start: the introductions. My name is Lorena, I’m 26 years old and I was born – and still live – in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Yeah, I’m from that part of the world almost nobody living on the planet hears about unless something very embarrassing happens here (like when the news found out our president was involved in a web of corruption). Anyway, what I truly and obviously want to say, since I’m writing to you, is how I LOVE YOUR BOOKS! And it is so funny the way I was introduced to them. A friend of mine had read The Arthur books before and tried for FOUR YEARS to convince me to read them. Well, every time I went to the bookstore and read the first paragraph of The Winter King, I said to myself ‘No way I’m going to read this boyish book’ and left the book there. It took me a summer with nothing to do and a lazy day in a bookstore to pass the time to buy it. Well, by the end of the book, I was telling myself: ‘How the hell did I think this was not worth reading?’ So, that is how your books became a good and healthy addiction. Since 2003, when one book is over, I buy another. Unfortunately, books in Brazil are extremely expensive and many of your titles have not been released here yet, so it is not that easy to be able to have one of yours. For example, only this year we have the Sharpe series here, but the publisher already said they are going to interrupt the publishing of the books at Sharpe’s Prey. It is a shame, Dick Sharpe has become one of my favorite characters ever. Sometimes buying your books in sites like Amazon is the only way to get the newest one, but, again, for a very high price. A price, I must say, I’m completely willing to pay for. I don’t know what moves me more when I’m reading your stories. The battles are terrific, your characters are the perfect imperfection and I never know what to expect next. As a journalist has pointed out, and whom I quote, ‘In a Cornwell novel, ships sink, battalions end up bloody and revenge is sweet, especially when served cold’. And, yeah, I love all this! These characters who fail but also never give up; these complex people who struggle to be good in a harsh world; characters who are not good, but who are not evil either. Just like in real life, and it is this realism who makes me feel so connected to them. The loyal and brutal Derfel, the brooding and confusing Thomas, the ironic and sarcastic Sharpe. After reading one of your interviews to some magazine, I realized Sharpe has your sense of humor. And I like that. And the battles, ah the battles& Yes, nobody describe their sounds as good as you. I feel as if I were in there, fighting alongside your characters. It is a perfect and disturbing feeling, truly, even if I have strange dreams of dying from a bullet shot from an evil havildar in the night. For the first time in my life, a book has made me cry in some scenes, shout in encouragement for some characters in others and go to the extremes of throwing a book against the wall such was my anger at something that happened in The Enemy of God. I carry your books everywhere I go, to my ballet classes, to work (I’m a Brazilian journalist), so I can read them every chance I get. I’m a bookworm, I’ve been devouring books, as my dad says, since I was very young. I think it is his fault. He is a lawyer and it seems that they all have this ‘thing’ for books hahaha I still remember when I found a treasure in dad’s library when I was 12, a book named ‘The Fourth Protocol’, by Frederick Forsyth, and after that, I only wanted to read more. Dad is reading The Arthur’s trilogy now, and I think he liked it. Thank you for becoming a writer, I hope you continue writing these wonderful tales until your last day on this Earth. I would send you one of my books for you to sign if I could, but Brazilian male services are not reliable and I could risk never see it again heehee. So, I have to be content with sending this letter and pouring my feelings towards your stories to you. Sorry for the looooooooong letter. Sorry for butchering the English language. And until your next book! *abraços* (hugs) Lorena Novas