Amber

wtorek, 17 lutego 2026

Fore-people

I created a neologism with the Old English prefix "fore-" to convey a mythical register.

But it could also be "the old ones" or "the before-people". Although "the old ones" could also simply refer to elders.

That's why "fore-" is better. I wonder if a native speaker would agree?

______________________________________________________

Stworzyłam neologizm ze staroangielskim prefiksem „fore-", żeby oddać mityczny rejestr.

Ale mogłoby być też „the old ones" albo „the before-people". Coć the old ones to sugerować też może po prostu starszyznę.

Dlatego fore- jest lepiej. Ciekawe, czy native speaker też by tak uważał?

poniedziałek, 16 lutego 2026

They say red hair is a genetic mutation. In my novel, it is a map. From the shaman Ta-wade on the Frisian coast to a 21st-century archaeologist in Northern England, one thing binds them together besides the stone: the flame in their hair. Are they cousins?

Mówią, że rude włosy to mutacja genetyczna. W mojej powieści to mapa. Od szamanki Ta-wade na fryzyjskim wybrzeżu po archeolożkę w północnej Anglii XXI wieku – poza kamieniem łączy je jedno: ogień we włosach. Czy są kuzynkami?

niedziela, 15 lutego 2026

The Hook / Haczyk

A stone with a drop of sunlight trapped inside. The women who carried it. The world that tried to take it from them. Eight thousand years of history, condensed into a single bead of fossilized resin. As a biologist, I see Pinus succinifera.

As a writer, I see a witness. "Amber" is coming.

Kamień z uwięzioną w środku kroplą słońca. Kobiety, które go nosiły. Świat, który próbował im go odebrać. Osiem tysięcy lat historii zamknięte w jednym koraliku skamieniałej żywicy. Jako biolog widzę Pinus succinifera.

Jako pisarka widzę świadka. Nadchodzi „Bursztyn”.

#AmberNovel #HistoricalFiction #DeepTime #DebiutLiteracki #MonikaBetley

sobota, 14 lutego 2026

W sumie...

W sumie, jak o tym (tłumaczeniu) pomyśleć, to może autorowi jest łatwiej — przecież chyba wie, co miał na myśli, gdy pisał o bawołach. Bawołów w Europie nie było, nawet w plejstocenie. Ale były żubry, a potem, w holocenie, tury.

Dlatego jako tłumaczka nie napiszę "buffalos", ale raczej "bisons". Bo mowa o dziejach jeszcze sprzed początku akcji książki — właśnie w plejstocenie.

Actually, when you think about it (the translation), maybe the author has it easier—after all, he presumably knows what he meant when he wrote about buffaloes. There were no buffaloes in Europe, even in the Pleistocene. But there were wisents, and then, in the Holocene, aurochs. That is why, as a translator, I will not write "buffalos", but rather "bisons". It's because this refers to a history from even before the book's plot begins—specifically in the Pleistocene.

piątek, 13 lutego 2026

Doggerland

6200 BCE. Doggerland. Imagine a land that no longer exists, connecting Britain to Europe. A mother places a stone around her daughter’s neck. The Storegga tsunami is coming, but the story is just beginning.

Writing about a vanished world is like translating a language with no speakers left. You have to listen to the silence. And close your eyes.

6200 p.n.e. Doggerland. Wyobraźcie sobie ląd, którego już nie ma, łączący Brytanię z Europą. Matka zawiesza kamień na szyi córki. Nadchodzi tsunami Storegga, ale historia dopiero się zaczyna.

Pisanie o zaginionym świecie jest jak tłumaczenie języka, którym nikt już nie mówi. Trzeba wsłuchać się w ciszę. I zamknąć oczy.

#Doggerland #Prehistory #AncientHistory #WritingCommunity #NowaPowieść

Pracuję nad tłumaczeniem „Amber”

Pracuję nad tłumaczeniem „Amber”. To powolny proces, bo tłumaczenie książki to jak przesadzanie kwiatu do nowej doniczki. Co zrobić, żeby nie zniszczyć najważniejszych korzeni? Które zostawić, żeby roślina rosła w nowej glebie?

Ta historia zaczyna się tysiące lat temu — w świecie, który dosłownie znika pod wodą. Morze cofa się, ludzie wierzą, że to dar, a potem wraca fala. I zostaje tylko to, co ktoś zdołał unieść w dłoni.

Jeśli wszystko pójdzie zgodnie z planem, książka będzie dostępna przed wakacjami.

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Amber

A novel spanning eight thousand years

AMBER

Monika I. Betley

A stone with a drop of sunlight trapped inside.
The women who carried it.
The world that tried to take it from them.

The Novel

Eight thousand years ago, on the shores of a land that would soon vanish beneath the sea, a mother placed an amber stone around her daughter’s neck. It had a hole drilled through it by a bone needle, and a tiny light trapped inside, as though it held a drop of the sun.

Since that day, the stone has never stopped travelling. It has been worn as a talisman, traded for a child’s life, set in Roman gold, hidden in underground chambers, mistaken for the Holy Grail, and rediscovered by a twenty-first-century archaeologist whose hair is the same shade of red as every woman who has carried it before her.

Amber follows the stone and its bearers across eight millennia — from prehistoric Doggerland to the Frisian coast, from the slave markets of Ostia to Roman Britannia, from the ruins of post-Roman Eboracum to the Scottish Highlands — in a novel about memory, loss, and the threads that connect us to those who came before.

Each chapter is a world complete in itself: a different century, a different language, a different way of being human. And yet they are all one story — the story of what survives when everything else is taken away.

Eight Thousand Years

6200 BCE

Doggerland

A girl named Aire receives the stone from her mother on the shores of a land between Britain and Europe. The Storegga tsunami is coming.

5800 BCE

A New Shore

A shaman called Ta-wade guards the old ways on the Frisian coast. A charismatic stranger named Marwos arrives, and the community begins to turn.

c. 100 CE

The Frisian Coast

Twelve-year-old Sunna is sold for three amphorae of wine. On a slave ship bound for Rome, the amber is the one thing that is still hers.

130 CE

Eboracum

In Roman Britain, a slave called Succina flees a collapsing city. A druid who once knew Boudicca gives her daughter a new name — and an old one.

c. 440 CE

Bryneich

A monk and a bard-woman share wine in a snowbound hut. One has parchment and ink. The other has a song. Between them, they write a legend.

793 →

The Viking Age & Beyond

The stone moves north, through centuries of invasion, faith, war, and forgetting — until a young archaeologist finds a lidar anomaly on a hillside in northern England.

Present

Northern England

Amber, a red-haired archaeology student, discovers underground passages encircling an ancient tree. She does not yet know that she is the last in a line that stretches back to the beginning.

From the Novel

And then the wave struck. — Doggerland, 6200 BCE

No one yet called him shaman, but already they brought him gifts, and they had stopped calling him a stranger. — The Frisian Coast, 5800 BCE

Memory is the one thing that cannot be burned or torn up by the roots. — Bryneich, c. 440 CE

The Author

Monika I. Betley

Biologist, literary translator, writer, and poet. Author of the poetry collection Na skraju muzyki (On the Edge of Music). Her work lives at the intersection of science and literature, precision and imagination, the ancient and the contemporary.

Amber is her first novel.

AMBER

A novel by Monika I. Betley

Translation in progress · Fourteen chapters · Eight thousand years