Companion piece

One day in post-Brexit, mid-pandemic Britain, artist Sandy Gray receives an unexpected phone call from university acquaintance Martina Pelf. Martina is calling Sandy to ask for help with a mysterious question she's been left with after she's spent half a day locked in a room by border control officials for no reason she can fathom : `Curlew or curfew ? You choose.' And what's any of this got to do with the story of a young and talented blacksmith hounded from her trade and her home more than five hundred years ago ? Mi Smith's novel takes wing, soaring between our atomized present and our medieval past in the hope we can open our locked-down homes and selves to all the other times, other species, other histories, other possibilities.