Welcome to another exciting tour with Novel Publicity. This time with Author Ed Kurst and his first novel, The Know Preservation! As usual, we've got great bloggers joining us with reviews, guest posts and interviews as well as unique prizes like a Kindle Paperwhite, and pen set!
Read an Excerpt from The Know: Preservation, by Author Ed Kurst
As part of our launch week celebrations, The Know: Preservation is on sale for only 99¢! Get it before the end of the week!
CHAPTER 3: THE GREAT MIGRATION
Am I dead?
I couldn’t hear, touch, move. Bodiless, my consciousness careened down a corridor of utter blackness. Yet there was something there, something my mind was connected to in a way that had never happened before.
Falling into this endless spinning void, I began to thrash around in a panic. At the same time, my heart raced in exhilaration and anticipation. I slowed and then paused in the uncertain darkness. It was as if I was standing on tiptoe at the edge of the Grand Canyon in the dead of night, arms spread wide, waiting for the whipping winds to lift me into flight or potentially cast me into oblivion.
All that separated me from familiar reality was a transparent black membrane. Beyond, tall grasses waved on a moonlit plain, eventually breaking against thickening scrub brush and a forested area. I pressed my consciousness against the fragile boundary and pushed through.
On the edge of the forest, primitive humans spoke in low, guttural voices. I was drawn inexorably to the eldest at the gathering and entered her mind. I was still myself but also simultaneously viewed, felt, and watched from within her at this gathering. Her present, her experiences, her thoughts were now mine.
Immediately sensing my presence, she pushed me gently but firmly to a mental arm’s length and silently commanded, ‘Traveler, observe.’
***
CHAPTER 4: THE PILGRIMAGE
For the twentieth time in a hundred years, Maddie Alkira made the pilgrimage. The day was blast-furnace hot, temperatures soaring higher than any in recorded history, a strange harbinger for the coming end of the world.
She stopped her slow trudge up the narrow rock outcropping and leaned heavily on a tall walking stick. The heat rolling off the cliff face was palpable, making it difficult for her to catch her breath. Her back pressed against the cliff face, only a foot away from the precipice, she squinted against the midday sun. The enigmatic depths of her blue-black eyes betrayed strength of will and Knowledge not seen in a thousand generations.
As far as the eye could see was a rust-and-brown landscape broken only very sparsely by a few rugged and twisted bushes. Harshness and desolation—this was her life and heritage. The isolation of Australia, the land of her ancestors, had served her people’s mission well.
She grasped her staff even tighter, seemingly trying to draw strength from the tens of generations that had used it before her. Thousands of generations had walked this same path. She completed the last hundred steps of her trek, the trail dead-ending halfway up the mesa.
It had been five years since Maddie had last been here. She carefully examined the rugged rock surface in front of her and shuffled within an inch of the sheer edge. At full arm’s length over the precipice, she pressed an indentation, and a stone doorway slid open. Maddie took a single long step, as if about to walk off the edge, and vanished—the opening closing behind her.
About the Book
John Preston set aside the easy bullet that would end his certain lingering death. He now Knew too much. His mind had just returned from a wild ride tens of thousands of years into the past where he witnessed three primitive humans divining a path to save humankind from a global fiery catastrophe. What John now Knew might cure him but could also require he shred the very fabric of time and space.
John’s quest for answers will thrust him into the lead role to confront the Consortium, a cabal of eight families with the power to Know the future and the past. Guided by John’s latent Know ability and a 70,000 year old prophecy, he sets out on a path for his own salvation. Success will mean life, failure…a cruel doom for all humankind.
Preservation is the first book in the Know Trilogy which wraps a new theory of space-time, humankind’s evolution, millennia old conspiracies, and imminent global destruction around a broken man’s redemption, an evil man’s reckoning and a driven woman’s unique destiny.
About the Author
Ed Kurst’s life as a child was a nostalgic bit of Americana, with two married parents, one sibling, and a pet beagle. They didn’t even lock their cars. The only thing missing was the proverbial white picket fence, but their neighbor did build a split rail one from seasoned logs.
As a kid, Ed frequented a neighborhood library, accessed by a spiral staircase to the second floor of an old brick building. It was a wondrous place to a curious child. Hardback novels were stacked from floor to ceiling and nestled in every nook and cranny of the library’s dusty shelves. Tolkien, Lovecraft, and Asimov were his first and favorite fantasy and science fiction authors. In between reading these classics, he devoured every book about dinosaurs and astrophysics his young mind could comprehend.
These early literary influences eventually led him to study a pre-med, engineering curriculum with a special focus on the psychology and physiology of the human brain. Eager to get out in the real world, and not spend six more years in school, he decided to pursue the engineering side of his interests. He didn’t completely abandon his calling for medicine. But getting an EMT qualification and occasionally riding an ambulance at night seemed to satisfy that urge.
Ed Kurst’s engineering vocation led him to live and work in five European countries and several places in the United States. During the last decade of a varied career, he settled in the US Gulf Coast and specialized in leading diverse technical teams to implement new technology and develop mega engineering projects. Once retired, he turned his attention to other pursuits.
One fateful month, about eight years ago, he was reading all he could about the CERN particle accelerator, the migration of homo sapiens out of Africa, the demise of the Neanderthals, and epigenetics. He also was reacquainting himself with his favorite fantasy and science fiction authors. Voilà, The Know trilogy was born! The first book—The Know: Preservation—is due for publication in 2016. The second—The Know: Evolution—is in draft form and scheduled for 2017. The last in the series—The Know: Salvation—should follow in 2018. And, another novel—The Fae—is in progress as well. It’s packed full of strange and wonderful fantasy creatures that live and love and scheme right under our very noses!
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