Welcome to Birddom – a land where magpies rule. Dark forces are at work. An evil intelligence is masterminding their inexorable rise. Dominance has been achieved by systematic genocide and slaughter. In Birddom, blackbird and sparrow have been exterminated. The magpie has replaced the pigeon in the city and the starling in the garden. For small birds throughout the land, survival is everything.
Birddom needs a hero. A bird to fight the darkness, and bring light back to the land. But what can one bird do, in the face of such evil?
One for Sorrow, Two for Joy was Ziji Publishing’s first title.
Written by Clive Woodall, a former Sainsbury’s grocery manager, it is an allegorical tale of the struggle between good and evil. The manuscript thudded through Franc Roddam’s letterbox one morning in 2003, having been forwarded by his bank manager, whose assistant was, in fact, Clive’s wife. Ever grateful for his bank manager’s tolerance of his mortgage needs, Franc felt obliged to read it, but was soon engrossed by Clive’s dark storytelling and the incredibly real world he had created.
Within months, Franc had decided to publish the book himself, and Ziji Publishing was born. Not only that, but sensing the potential in the story, he manages to secure a $1 million movie deal from Disney – unprecedented for a first-time author. Even more remarkably, the rights to this novel were sold in twenty countries, and this extraordinary story is now loved the world over, from the USA to China, via Slovenia and Thailand.