A York author has taken a childhood tragedy and turned it into a searing study of grief, reports Stephen Lewis.

MAGDALENA Chavez was 14 when her friend was murdered. It was more than 30 years ago and half a world away, but time and distance don't always heal.

The girl was 15, a year ahead of Magdalena at school, and her death shocked the little mid-western town of Lee's Summit in Missouri, USA, where Magdalena lived. "She was strangled, her feet were placed in concrete, and she was sunk in a lake," Magdalena, above, says. "But the ties holding her to the concrete must have come loose and her body came to the top.

"She was pregnant at the time. It was the most devastating experience for a small community. It was shocking."

Magdalena talked through her friend's death with her father, an itinerant preacher. She says he "explained to me a view of life and death that brought me comfort".

After more than three decades, the York caf owner and publisher believed she had, if not forgotten the event, at least put it behind her. Then, while writing her first novel Festival Of Angels, she found herself thinking about her friend again: so much so that she became part of one of the characters in the book.

That summer Magdalena, owner of El Piano in Grape Lane and boss of York publisher ENDpapers, returned to the United States to visit family. Two Soham schoolgirls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, had just gone missing - and when she returned to the UK, she found they had been murdered.

She had intended to start work on the sequel to Festival Of Angels, but instead a different book emerged.

In The Smoke Of The Sagebrush is a searing novel about grief, loss and a kind of healing. Young widow Em Hammond has never come to terms with the death of her beloved husband Joe, a North Carolina 'shrimper' - shrimp fisherman - whose drowned body is washed up on the shore.

As she struggles to make sense of her life, she stumbles across a family secret. A cousin she didn't even know she had was a child arsonist; and as Em's grief drives her to investigate, she discovers that her cousin's bizarre behaviour was driven by the murder of a childhood friend.

Em's search for understanding takes her from the US to Suffolk and back; and eventually to a kind of acceptance. But it is the raw power of her grief that makes the book so memorable. At times, it is almost overwhelming.

"Watching the fire I could feel him near me... It reminded me of being on the floor tucked between his legs, his great arms over my shoulders... of him slopping a spill of coffee on my shoulder as he shifted in his seat to reach for the poker... A white-hot grief lasered up my legs... Oh Joe, how could you? How could you leave me here? How could you go? How could you? And I must have twisted the mug so hard in my hand that the handle broke. For as I sat crying and rocking, the line of blood ran from my hand down my wrist and was made wavy by watching it through my tears."

Powerful stuff.

In The Smoke Of The Sagebrush (ENDpapers, £7.99) will be launched at Borders in Davygate, York, from 6pm-7pm on Tuesday, July 6. All welcome.

Updated: 09:35 Wednesday, June 30, 2004