About the Author

Maria Ian was a human rights counsellor for over fifteen years before moving from copious late-night legal writing to authoring suspense fiction. She holds three graduate degrees and has also worked in publishing as an editor and in education as an instructor, for national security and foreign relations topics, among others. As child and young adult, Maria lived in six different countries and had exposure to disparate cultures and languages from a young age. She identifies her heritage as Finnish, British, Ukrainian, Italian, Turkish, central South Asian and Chinese, and ardently pursues the accurate on-the-ground reading of history and politics. In her spare time, Maria studies fitness, eastern medicine, African animism and East Asian Taoism.Her tetralogy, of which The Garden and The Island are the first two installments, centers on the incommensurability of values in contemporary society, and on the changes created by the western and eastern attempts at resolution. She is also a wildlife conservation enthusiast.