'Shooting for the pot' Philippa's many lives have all the elements of fantasy fiction. Born in South Africa and fatherless, she experienced the wildest parts of rural Africa in the care of her grandfather, often on safari for weeks inspecting rural African schools in a ten ton 'caboose' with a cook, a tracker marksman and a folding table. The other extreme was imprisonment in boarding schools studying the Metaphysical poets, Theology and the English Monarchy, and always hungry. These solitary extremes perhaps contributed to the need to reconcile the influences of two worlds, African liberty and European culture, leading ultimately to Involution, a life's work that cost her the loss of country family and liberty. Female emancipation was fed early. Her grandmother was related to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and her great great aunt had had a small but important role in the life of George Eliot; their unorthodox lives were held up as a model of appropriate female daring-do. So it is perhaps not surprising that she should arrive at a poetic narrative to achieve her reconciliation between science and religion, matter and mind. The 'leitmotif' of her writing is characterized by a celebration of the individual, often eccentric, always out of the mainstream. So her work has never fitted into a Dewey index easily, crossing genres, bridging conventions. It is the gaps in human experience that interest her, and those 'gaps' form both the backbone of both these books and the poetic narratives appropriate to evocative and broad ideas. After sampling medicine, architecture, classics and fine art she ultimately achieved degrees in Zoology and Psychology. She has lived on far from desert islands in Mozambique, fishing for supper; lectured to mature University students on 'Saints and Scientists' (the theory under-pinning Involution-An Odyssey); designed buildings; self-built an arts centre and concert hall; raised four daughters, and failed to master the cello, her greatest regret. As a limbering exercise for this work she published 'A Shadow in Yucatan' a story evoking the promise and disappointment of the sixties and has a novel and a collection of short stories (Minding the Gap) in the pipe-line. She lives in Somerset in her converted barns with an old collie and a long-suffering husband. The book website can be found here http://involution-odyssey.com/ Her website with odd observations and short poetic comments can be found here http://philipparees.wordpress.com/ Please feel free to contact her with comments questions and observations through the site, or email her(Via website) She would be grateful for welcome contact from readers.