Archives de catégorie : Nos incontournables

HOUSE OF DEVILS de Kayla Edwards

From the author of Dreams of Ice and Iron comes a new fantasy romance perfect for fans of Sarah J Maas, Ilona Andrews, and Cassandra Clare.

HOUSE OF DEVILS
by Kayla Edwards
Self-published, 2022 – 2026
(via The Whalen Agency)

Book #1: CITY OF GODS AND MONSTERS (January 2022)

Welcome to the city of Angelthene. We hope you survive.

Loren Calla has only ever been ordinary. As a human struggling to survive in a city that caters to the needs of vampires, werewolves, witches, and other supernatural creatures, she always assumed her life would remain simple, predictable, and as safe as her world would allow.

Until she barely escapes abduction at the hands of Darkslayers—supernatural bounty hunters that possess the Sight, a magical tracking ability that allows them to see a person’s aura—and one of her friends is taken in her place. The abductors are demanding a ransom: Loren’s life in exchange for her friend’s safe return. Loren will do whatever it takes to get her friend back—even if it means accepting help from Darien Cassel, the leader of the Seven Devils, the most feared Darkslaying circle in the city.

Darien specializes in tracking down demons and criminals that are better off dead than alive, so when he takes a job to track down Loren and finds out she is human—and couldn’t hurt a fly if her life depended on it—he decides to protect her instead of turn her in for a reward. As much as Loren doesn’t want to admit it, Darien is her best and only chance at finding her friend alive, if she can somehow manage to get along with him—and not fall head-over-heels in love with him in the process, which is far easier said than done.

When more women start disappearing, and some of them slowly turn up dead, Loren and Darien’s search for answers takes them deep into Angelthene’s corrupt underbelly, where they discover a dark secret that threatens to unravel their world. And when tragedy strikes, Loren learns that love can make an ordinary person do extraordinary things.

Book #2: CITY OF SOULS AND SINNERS (February 2023)

Something wicked is coming…

In the sequel to CITY OF GODS AND MONSTERS, Loren Calla and Darien Cassel have settled back into their old routines, grateful that the whirlwind of dangers they’d faced on Kalendae and the weeks leading up to it are now behind them—or so they think.

But Loren soon finds herself caught in a new storm of trouble when the Terran Imperator blackmails her into working for him. There’s only one problem: he expects her to use her magic, and she doesn’t seem to have any of it left. To keep Darien and the other Devils safe, she agrees to everything the imperator asks of her. But the secrets she is forced to keep from Darien, and her involvement with the imperator’s son, threaten to drive her away from Darien in ways she might never recover from…

As Randal Slade’s successor, Darien wants nothing to do with the throne his father once sat in, but the city of Angelthene has other plans. The Magical Protections Unit asks for his help in taking down the illegal arms trade his father once dabbled in, and to do that Darien must claim his place at the top of the tiers of Darkslayers—a crown the other circles are willing to kill to possess. As he spirals deeper into the secrets his father kept, he makes enemies of friends and friends of enemies—and finds himself buried so deep in Angelthene’s underbelly that he is uncertain he’ll ever get out of it. And if that wasn’t enough, Darien fears he is going crazy when he starts to see creatures that only he can see…

Return to Angelthene in City of Souls and Sinners, a gripping, action-packed tale that tackles themes of love and loss, light and darkness, and the battle between good and evil—and what happens when you can’t tell which is which.

Book #3: CITY OF LIES AND LEGENDS (March 2024)

When Darkslayer Darien Cassel first took human Loren Calla under his wing, he’d made a promise to protect her from anything. And now that she has fallen into a coma, every day a losing battle to return to life, he is determined to save her.

When he hears rumors of the one place in Terra that houses a secret that just might bring her back to him, he drops everything to try it, leaving behind the city he grew up in and the people he calls family. His decision sets his best friend Maximus Reacher onto a road of his own—one no less dangerous than Darien’s as he unearths the secrets of his past, uncovering a multitude of lies and legends better left buried.

Meanwhile, in the historic city of Yveswich, Roman Devlin of the House of Black gets tangled up with a shapeshifting Selkie of the Riptide, a member of a rival Darkslaying house and a thorn in his side. Shay Cousens is a pickpocket with endless tricks up her sleeve—and if Roman isn’t careful, she might succeed at stealing both his wallet and his heart as they work together to find her missing sister. Their path will lead them not just to Angelthene, but also into the dark secrets of the Phoenix Head Society—and the restorative body of water that has the power to cleave their world in two.

Loyalties are tested, and worlds collide in CITY OF LIES AND LEGENDS, the third installment in the HOUSE OF DEVILS series.

Kayla Edwards is the author of the HOUSE OF DEVILS series— CITY OF GODS AND MONSTERS, CITY OF SOULS AND SINNERS, and CITY OF LIES AND LEGENDS. She is also the author of the upper-YA romantasy novel, Dreams of Ice and Iron. She started writing CITY OF GODS AND MONSTERS when she was in high school, so the characters and the world they live in are very close to her heart. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys traveling, spending time in nature, and binge-watching her favorite television shows with her husband.

THE AUSTEN AFFAIR de Madeline Bell

Outlander meets Bridget Jones’s Diary in Jane Austen’s Regency England.

THE AUSTEN AFFAIR
by Madeline Bell
St. Martin’s Griffin, September 2025
(via KT Literary)

C-list actress Tess Bright grew up in a messy SoCal apartment watching Jane Austen flicks on repeat with her mom. When Mom passes away and Tess lands a breakout role as the female lead in a Northanger Abbey adaptation, she emerges from her grief cocoon with everything to prove. One big problem? Her upsettingly handsome castmate, Hugh Balfour, whose rigid acting methodology allows no room to collaborate with a go-with-the-flow whirlwind like Tess.

When sparks fly between the leads (literally) and an electrical accident zaps the pair back in time to the Regency era, Tess and Hugh must grudgingly learn to cooperate, leaning on each other to navigate the strict protocols of the past and find their way back home. Soon, they’re faking an engagement to misdirect the neighbors’ suspicions about their sudden arrival in country society.

Between militia rakes, nosy ancestors, and persistent suitors, the couple is swept into a comedy worthy of Austen herself. Tess never thought she could fall for anyone as uptight as Hugh, but as she gets to know his sensitive side, she realizes she might have misjudged him. With the romantic tension swelling between them, and her childhood fantasy made miraculously real, what happens if Tess doesn’t want to risk what they have by returning to her lonely 21st century reality?

Madeline Bell is a romance writer who has never met an enemies-to-lovers trope she didn’t like. She spends much of her free time ranking and continually reranking different adaptations of Jane Austen novels, and like a true rom-com heroine, she has a quirky day job working in a creative arts field in New York City.

TRANS TIME TRAVEL de Thomas Page McBee

Thomas Page McBee defines the concept of “trans time,” and how the trans experience can be a torch into the future for all of us.

TRANS TIME TRAVEL
A Mind-Bending Journey Across Continents, Centuries, and Dimensions
by Thomas Page McBee
Scribner, TBD
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

© A Klass Thomas Page McBee is at 42, he writes, one of the oldest trans people he knows, an “elder,”—and he’s also 12, “a man without a boyhood, alive at the end of the world.” Time is linear, but it’s also cyclical. This moment, with its fever-pitch of anti-trans rhetoric, a broken political system, not to mention climate change, can feel like the end of the world—as have other moments in our history. And yet, as Thomas writes, “the future is already here.” The seeds of what is to come already exist. We need to be asking different and better questions.

This books takes us through time and space and through the ideas that Thomas finds himself obsessed with: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; queer history of the American West; the story of Brandon Teena, subject of the film “Boys Don’t Cry” and the first trans person Thomas ever heard of; how the media, the medical system, the prison system, the archives have all told trans stories.

Thomas Page McBee’s TV and screenwriting career has been enormously successful, with several collaborations with Elliott Page and others, including for an adaptation on Amateur that HBO has momentum behind. He’s been praised by some of the most iconic writers of our generation, from Roxane Gay to Maggie Nelson. His work as a journalist is highly sought after, from the current piece on Mary Shelley he’s writing for Travel and Leisure to a T Magazine feature commissioned by Hanya Yanagihara.

WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE de Julian Zabalbeascoa

WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE is a daring, haunting, and, at times, darkly funny work of fiction that will both transport you to the treacherous days of the Spanish Civil War and bring into sharper focus the world we find ourselves in today.

WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE
by Julian Zabalbeascoa
Two Dollar Radio, Fall 2024
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

In late 1936, eighteen-year-old Isidro Elejalde leaves his Basque village in Northern Spain to join the fight to preserve his country’s democracy from the fascists. Months earlier, a group of Spanish generals launched a military coup to overthrow Spain’s newly elected left-wing government. They assumed the population would welcome the coup but throughout the country people like Isidro remained loyal to the ideals of democracy, and the Spanish Civil War began in bloody earnest.

Isidro’s odyssey through war-ravaged Spain connects him to a diverse cast of characters on both sides of the war—a female soldier in an all-male battalion, a reluctant conscript recently emigrated from Cuba, a young girl whose parents have abandoned her to fight against the fascists, a mother of two who is secretly an anonymous writer of liberal propaganda, and a fascist soldier determined to avenge his murdered captain, among several others. Through this chorus of voices, we follow Isidro and many others as they struggle to maintain their humanity in a country determined to tear itself apart.

Conceived as a unified piece of fiction and unfolding in chronological order, WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE has the scope and power of a traditional novel, though its episodic structure and shifting perspectives also call to mind books like Julia Philips’s Disappearing Earth and Phil Klay’s Redeployment.

A remarkable feat of research and imagination, Julian’s all too timely fiction brings both the Spanish Civil War, and, by extension, the many atrocities unfolding today, into stark relief, as Isidro and others navigate a country where cities are shelled beyond recognition, where the big lies of fascism have poisoned many members of society, and where even the most heinous acts of horror have quickly become permissible.

“A stunning first novel, ambitious, intensely true, certain to be read for a long time. Zabalbeascoa is a phenomenon. » – Phillip Meyer, NY Times bestselling author of The Son and American Rust

“In the tradition of such master storytellers as Isaac Babel and Phil Klay, Julian Zabalbeascoa has written a piercing narrative set during the Spanish Civil War. Alive with wonderful characters, moments of dread, bathos and humour, What We Tried to Bury Grows Here illuminates a crucial period of history. This is a timely and important story.” – Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field, Mercury and The Flight of Gemma Hardy

“Julian Zabalbeascoa is the real deal, a major talent, and the story he’s telling here is both riveting and terrifying.” —Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Empire Falls

A first-generation Basque-American (dual citizen), Julian Zabalbeascoa is a Visiting Professor in the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he teaches classes on Basque culture and the Spanish Civil War and leads annual study abroad programs to Donostia-San Sebastian, Havana, and Madrid. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans. His interviews and reviews have appeared in The Believer, Electric Literature and The Millions.

KID YOUTUBER PRESENTS: HALL MONITORS #1 de Marcus Emerson

From the creator of Diary of a 6th Grade Ninja comes HALL MONITORS!

KID YOUTUBER PRESENTS: HALL MONITORS #1
by Marcus Emerson
Self-published, July 2023
(via Writers House)

Meet Parker Ronald, captain of the Hall Monitors. Not every school has them, but Wood Intermediate does, at least for one more week.

Being a Hall Monitor ain’t always pretty, but somebody’s gotta do it. And after a high-speed chase ends with two kids kaboomed against a trophy case, the principal has decided to cut the program. But with the help of Davy Spencer and a little something called YouTube, Parker will try to prove to everyone why the Hall Monitors shouldn’t get axed. Oh, and the school’s most prized possession also gets ganked, so that’s a whole thing, too.

HALL MONITORS is a funny children’s book for ages 9-12, middle school students, and adults who never grew up.

Marcus Emerson is the author of Kid Youtuber, Diary of a 6th Grade Ninja, and The Super Life of Ben Braver.