Archives de catégorie : Fiction

MAGIC BELOW STAIRS de Caroline Stevermer

In an alternate Regency England, a plucky young boy is hired be a wizard’s assistant and with help from his fairy guardian, he will excel at his job and break a curse on the wizard. This charming Middle Grade novel is set in the same world as Caroline Stevermer and Patricia C. Wrede’s beloved Cecilia and Kate novels.

MAGIC BELOW STAIRS
by Caroline Stevermer
Dial Press, 2010
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)

11-year-old Frederick is plucked from an orphanage to be a servant to the wizard Lord Schofield. With help from Billy Bly, the brownie who has been his « fairy guardian » over the years, Frederick quickly proves his worth and excels at the difficult tasks assigned by Lord Schofield.

However, Lord Schofield has banished all magical creatures from his holdings so Frederick must keep Billy Bly’s existence a secret. When Billy Bly discovers dark magic within the Schofields’ manor house, it’s up to Frederick and Billy to break the curse and save the manor.

Caroline Stevermer is the multiple-award-winning author of the Cecelia and Kate Novels, the College of Magics Series, the Glass Magician Series, and the middle grade novels River Rats and Magic Below Stairs.

HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH d’Eliana Ramage

Told through an intricately woven constellation of narrative, it’s a novel of ambition and sacrifice, humor and desire, alienation and heartbreak, terror and wonder. At its core, it is the story of the extraordinary lengths one woman goes to find space for herself.

HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH
by Eliana Ramage
Avid Reader Press, TBD
(via The Gernert Company)

HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH is Eliana Ramage’s debut novel about a young, queer Cherokee woman relentlessly determined to become an astronaut. It’s a book whose expansive heart, powerfully realized characters, thematic richness, and ambitious sweep are reminiscent of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by way of Andy Weir, Sterlin Harjo (Reservation Dogs) and Kelli Jo Ford.

Spanning almost thirty years, and several continents, it’s also a book that stretches to encompass the multifaceted lives of four different Cherokee women. There’s Steph Harper, our obsessive, determined, at times maddening aspiring astronaut, but also: her younger sister Kayla Harper, an artist who goes on to become an Indigenous influencer and whose determination to appear good takes her life to unexpected places; Steph’s college girlfriend Della Sixkiller, who strives to reclaim her identity as an adult after being removed from her Cherokee family through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act; and Hannah Harper, Steph and Kayla’s mother, who ran from an abusive husband back into the arms of the capital of the Cherokee Nation when her girls were young and who’s been afraid to look back ever since.

Each of these women is running from something across this novel — but ultimately, HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH asks what it could look like instead to run toward. Time and again, Ramage urges readers to find a way to hold, with empathy, more than one strand of history, more than one idea, more than one way of being Indian — or being anyone — in their heads at once. Hers is a debut about family and community, earthly fragility, women in STEM, complicity and reckoning, visibility in the face of generational erasure, and what it looks like to find pinpricks of hope even against a backdrop of darkness. I could not possibly love it more.

Eliana Ramage is a queer Cherokee Nation citizen living in Nashville. She was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has been a Richard E. Guthrie Memorial Fellow, a Lambda Literary fellow, a Harpo Foundation Native American Residency Fellow at Vermont Studio Center, and a Tin House Scholar. One excerpt from this novel won the CRAFT Elements Short Fiction Prize, and another was chosen for The Masters Review Anthology. Her stories have also appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal and The Baltimore Review.

GOOD GIRLS de Leesa Gazi

A stunning literary novel of thrilling suspense by writer and filmmaker Gazi, and translated by Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Nadiya.

GOOD GIRLS
by Leesa Gazi and translated by Shabnam Nadiya
Amazon Crossing, December 2023
(via David Black Literary Agency)

For sisters Lovely and Beauty, home is a prison under the toxic watch of their controlling, abusive mother, Farida Khanam. The girls are each locked in their own rooms, their own gilded cages, and have never been allowed to leave the house by themselves. GOOD GIRLS opens and it’s Lovely’s 40th birthday, the day Farida will give Lovely the freedom to go to the Gausia Market alone. “Today was the day for everyone to be what they weren’t, or perhaps be what they were.” With a tragic foreboding, we know today is the day that will change everything.

Taking place over the span of a single day, GOOD GIRLS unfolds in page-turning slow-motion, as Lovely interacts with the outside world, as the secrets of their lives in captivity emerge, and as she battles the man inside her head. With masterful precision and lyrical prose, Gazi and Nadiya grab us from the opening pages with a sinister premise: what does a 40-year-old woman who has never been granted freedom for a few hours do? Farida’s tautly constructed world begins to unravel as temptations, demons and the past come to haunt each of them. Good Girls explores the emotional violence of the matriarchy as well as the patriarchy’s suffocating effort to keep women within four walls. Lovely and Beauty show us the cost of freedom.

GOOD GIRLS was originally published in Bengali in 2010 by Sucheepatra Publishers, under the title Hellfire. It was published in English in India by Eka/Westland Books (Sept 2020) and was shortlisted for the Kâpylä Translation Prize. Listed by Words Without Borders as One of the Best Translated Books of 2020.

Leesa Gazi is a Bangladeshi British author, theater practitioner, award-winning filmmaker, and joint artistic director of the London-based arts organization Komola Collective. She has dedicated her career to presenting stories from women’s perspectives. Multiple plays written and translated by Gazi toured nationally and internationally. She was the cowriter and performer of the play Birangona: Women of War, nominated for the Offies (UK), which she later developed into the documentary feature Rising Silence, which sheds light on the lives of sexual violence survivors in the aftermath of the Bangladesh Liberation War.

THE OXHERD BOY de Regina Linke

“Are we on the right path?” asked the rabbit. The boy looked around. “Maybe there is no path. Maybe the path is made simply by walking.”

THE OXHERD BOY
Parables of Love, Compassion, and Community
by Regina Linke
Clarkson Potter, March 2024

Following in the footsteps, hooves and pawprints of the bestselling illustrated inspirational book The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse comes Regina Linke’s exquisite fable THE OXHERD BOY.

Largely based on the wisdom of classical Asian philosophy and religion, the story gently cultivates resilience, compassion and humility through the small adventures and conversations of these three friends. As the boy, the rabbit, and the ox (who represent the three core beliefs of classical Chinese thought) wander through the day, meeting villagers, forging rivers, tilling fields, and planting rice, they muse about ways to live mindfully in an often stormy world. Artist and writer Regina Linke’s magnificent paintings are executed in the ancient Chinese technique known as gongbi that uses highly detailed brushstrokes and careful layering of color over fine line drawings to create magical, immersive scenes and emotive, engaging characters.

Regina Linke is a Taiwanese American artist specializing in contemporary Chinese gongbi painting. She writes and illustrates stories that celebrate East Asian folklore and philosophy in an accessible and modern way. Her most notable creation is “The Oxherd Boy,” a single-panel, adult webcomic with a highly engaged audience whose characters volunteers from around the world have translated the comics into ten languages. Regina Linke lives in Taipei, Taiwan with her husband and young son, who inspires her every day as a real-life oxherd boy.

THE CHAOS QUEEN QUINTET de Christopher Husberg

Perfect for fans Daniel Abraham and Brandon Sanderson, THE CHAOS QUEEN QUINTET is a dark and epic fantasy series that follows an amnesiac man, a woman with burgeoning magical abilities, and a priestess whose faith is tested as they become the center of a war between government and religion.

THE CHAOS QUEEN QUINTET
by Christopher Husberg
Titan, 2016 – 2021
(via JABberwocky)

Book 1: DUSKFALL (June 2016)

Stuck with arrows and close to death, a man is pulled from the icy waters of the Gulf of Nahl. As he is nursed back to health by a local fisherman, two things become very clear: he has no idea who he is, and he can kill a man with terrifying ease.

The fisherman is a tiellan, a race which has long been oppressed and grown wary of humans. His daughter, Winter, is a seemingly quiet young woman, but behind her placid mask she has her demons. She is addicted to frostfire – a substance that both threatens to destroy her and simultaneously gives her phenomenal power.

A young priestess, Cinzia, hears the troubling news of an uprising in her native city of Navone. Absconding from the cloistered life that she has kept for the last seven years, she knows she must make the long journey home. The flames of rebellion threatening her church and all that she believes in are bad enough, but far worse is the knowledge that the heretic who sparked the fire is her own sister.

These three characters may have set out on different paths, but fate will bring them together on one thrilling and perilous adventure.

Book 2: DARK IMMOLATION (June 2017)

A new religion is rising, gathering followers drawn by rumors of prophetess Jane Oden. Her sister Cinzia – one-time Cantic priestess – is by her side, but fears that Jane will lead them to ruin. For both the Church and the Nazaniin assassins are still on their trail, and much worse may come. Knot, his true nature now revealed if not truly understood, is haunted by the memories of others, and is not the ally he once was. Astrid travels to Tinska to find answers for her friend, but the child-like vampire has old enemies who have been waiting for her return. And beyond the Blood Gate in the northern empire of Roden, a tiellan woman finds herself with a new protector. One who wants to use her extraordinary abilities for his own ends.

Book 3: BLOOD REQUIEM (June 2018)

« Perfect for fans of Daniel Abraham and Brandon Sanderson. » Library Journal on DuskfallThe Nine Daemons are on the rise.Once believed dead and gone, Daemons have found a way back into the world. But the only people who can withstand their assault are spread across the face of the Sfaera.Free at last from the influence of assassins and emperors alike, the psimancer Winter sails back to her hometown—only to find a new trouble stirring. Meanwhile, the heretic sisters Jane and Cinzia Oden are beset by supernatural attacks. And soon their allies, the vampire-girl Astrid and the former assassin Knot, must face the terrifying Black Matron.As new battles are fought, the Daemons creep ever closer to freedom, and the legend of the Chaos Queen may soon be made anew.

Book 4: FEAR THE STARS (June 2019)

Many forces converge on the great city of Triah, bent on its destruction. By sea, Empress Cova of Roden sails with her armada, determined to bring the rival nation under her yoke. From land, Winter, the Chaos Queen, brings her tiellan army, set on revenge. And their advance brings a yet more terrible army still: awoken by the Chaos Queen’s powers, daemons mass on the border between worlds, waiting for a way in.

Caught between the encroaching foes, a small group holds the key to saving the Sfaera from destruction: Knot, the former assassin; Cinzia, the exiled priestess; and Astrid, the vampire-child. But the only way to do so is to step into the Void beyond worlds—from which no one can return unchanged.

Book 5: DAWNRISE (May 2021)

Nothing is as it seems.

Sfaera-shattering revelations reveal there is more to the Nine Daemons–and Canta–than anyone could have imagined, and deep in the heart of Triah, a threat that has lurked below the surface for years finally rises, gathering unimaginable power.

Knot, still reeling from a shocking death, tries to put himself back together in time to fight. Two ex-Nazaniin assassins, Code and Kali, form an unlikely alliance. Cinzia, more suspicious than ever of her sister Jane Oden–Canta’s prophetess–rallies as many people as she can to save the Sfaera from imminent destruction. And Winter, the Chaos Queen herself, realizes she must finally choose sides and face the greatest test of her life: finding the humility to seek help.

Deep in the heart of Triah, a threat that has lurked below the surface for years finally rises, gathering unimaginable power. Only the unlikely alliance formed between the two former Nazaniin assassins, Code and Kali, stands in its way.

Characters old and new join forces to preserve life as they know it. The darkest night the Sfaera has ever known is about to end, but whether it ends in daylight or destruction remains to be seen…

Christopher Husberg is the author of the Chaos Queen Quintet and contributed to the science fiction anthology Parallel Worlds. He received an MFA in creative writing from BYU. His short story, “Shelter Together,” was featured in the exhibit « A Desolating Sickness: Stories of Pandemic” at the Brigham Young University library.