Cecilia Dart-Thornton is the author of numerous bestselling fantasy novels, notably the Bitterbynde Trilogy. The Washington Post reported that the first summer after Neilsen Booktrack launched in Australia, it showed Dart-Thornton's newly launched fantasy tome The Ill-Made Mute hitting the Herald's best-seller list, ranked next to mainstream authors and 'serious' fiction. Technology, in one swift blow, destroyed a decades-long publishers' bias against fantasy. It demonstrated that what people were really buying was simply not reflected in the old bestseller lists, based as they were on reports from a small panel of bookshops. The reality was, people were buying fantasy - in particular, they were buying The Ill-Made Mute. This debut novel and its two sequels in the 'Bitterbynde Trilogy' went on to win fans and accolades across the globe.

The Ill-Made Mute was listed on Amazon's Best, Locus Magazine's Best First Novels, the Sydney Morning Herald's Top Twenty and the Australian Publishers' Association 'Australia's Favourite Read'. It is published in five languages and distributed in more than fifty countries around the world.