Archives par étiquette : The Gernert Company

BLOOD OVER BRIGHT HAVEN de M. L. Wang

A standalone dark fantasy for fans of Leigh Bardugo, V. E. Schwab, and Fullmetal Alchemist, M.L. Wang is a rising star of character-driven Sci Fi and Fantasy.

BLOOD OVER BRIGHT HAVEN
by M. L. Wang
Del Rey, October 2024
(via The Gernert Company)

For twenty years, Sciona has devoted every waking moment to the study of magic, fueled by a mad desire to achieve the impossible: to be the first woman ever admitted to the High Magistry at the University of Magics and Industry. When Sciona finally achieves her ambition and becomes a Highmage, she finds that her challenges have just begun. Her new colleagues are determined to make her feel unwelcome, and instead of a qualified lab assistant they give her a janitor. What neither Sciona nor her peers realize is that her taciturn assistant was not always a janitor. Ten years ago he was a nomadic hunter who lost his family on their perilous journey from the wild plains to the city. But now he sees the opportunity to finally understand the forces that decimated his tribe, drove him from his homeland, and keep the privileged in power. At first, mage and outsider have a fractious relationship. But working together they uncover an ancient secret that could change the course of magic forever—if it doesn’t get them killed first.

M. L. Wang is an author, martial artist, and weird recluse currently hiding somewhere in Wisconsin with her maroonbellied parakeet, Sulu. Her books include BLOOD OVER BRIGHT HAVEN, The Sword of Kaigen, the Theonite Series, and The Volta Academy Chronicles (published under Maya Lin Wang).

MOONBOUND de Robin Sloan

Robin Sloan expands the Penumbraverse to new reaches of time and space in a rollicking far-future adventure.

MOONBOUND
by Robin Sloan
MCD/FSG, June 2024
(via The Gernert Company)

In MOONBOUND, Robin Sloan has written a novel with the full scope and ambitious imagination of the very books that lit the engines of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore: an epic quest as only Sloan could conceive it, mixing science fiction, fantasy, good old-fashioned literary storytelling, and unrivaled enthusiasm for what’s next.

It is eleven thousand years from now . . . A lot has happened, and yet a lot is still very familiar. Ariel is a boy in a small town under a wizard’s rule. Like many adventurers before him, Ariel is called to explore a world full of unimaginable glories and challenges: unknown enemies, a mission to save the world, a girl. Here, as they say, be dragons. But none of this happens before Ariel comes across an artifact from an earlier civilization, a sentient, record-keeping artificial intelligence that carries with it the perspective of the whole of human history―and becomes both Ariel’s greatest ally and the narrator of our story.

MOONBOUND is an adventure into the richest depths of Story itself. It is a deeply satisfying epic of ancient scale, blasted through the imaginative prism one of our most forward-thinking writers. And this is only the beginning.

Robin Sloan grew up in Michigan and now splits his time between San Francisco and the internet. He is the author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough.

THE LOST BOY OF SANTA CHIONIA de Juliet Grames

One unidentified skeleton. Three missing men. A village full of secrets. The best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna brings us a sparkling—by turns funny and moving—novel about a young American woman turned amateur detective in a small village in Southern Italy.

THE LOST BOY OF SANTA CHIONIA
by Juliet Grames
Knopf, July 2024
(via The Gernert Company)

Calabria, 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old, starry-eyed American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there’s no mail, either.

Most troubling, though, is the human skeleton that surfaced after the flood waters receded. Who is it? And why don’t the police come and investigate? When an old woman begs Francesca to help determine if the remains are those of her long-missing son, Francesca begins to ask a lot of inconvenient questions. As an outsider, she might be the only person who can uncover the truth. Or she might be getting in over her head. As she attempts to juggle a nosy landlady, a suspiciously dashing shepherd, and a network of local families bound together by a code of silence, Francesca finds herself forced to choose between the charitable mission that brought her to Santa Chionia, and her future happiness, between truth and survival.

Set in the wild heart of Calabria, a land of sheer cliff faces, ancient tradition, dazzling sunlight—and one of the world’s most ruthless criminal syndicates—The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is a suspenseful puzzle mystery, a captivating romance, and an affecting portrait of a young woman in search of a meaningful life.

Juliet Grames is the best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Real Simple, Parade, and The Boston Globe, and she is the recipient of an Ellery Queen Award from the Mystery Writers of America. She is editorial director at Soho Press in New York.

THE MORNINGSIDE de Téa Obreht

There’s the world you can see. And then there’s the one you can’t. Welcome to The Morningside.

THE MORNINGSIDE
by Téa Obreht
Random House, March 2024
(via The Gernert Company)

When Silvia and her mother finally land in a place called Island City, after being expelled from their ancestral home in a not-too-distant future, they end up living and working at The Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower where Silvia’s aunt, Ena, serves as the superintendent. Silvia feels unmoored in her new life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about their family’s past. Silvia knows almost nothing about the place she was born and spent her early years; nor does she know why she and her mother had to leave. But in Ena there is an opening: a person willing to give a young girl glimpses into the folktales of her demolished homeland, a place of natural beauty and communal spirit that is lacking in Silvia’s lonely and impoverished reality.

Enchanted by Ena’s stories, Silvia begins seeing the world with magical possibilities, and becomes obsessed with the mysterious older woman who lives in the penthouse of the Morningside. Bezi Duras is an enigma to everyone in the building; she has her own elevator entrance, and only leaves to go out at night and walk her three massive hounds, often not returning until the early morning. Silvia’s mission to unravel the truth about this woman’s life, and her own haunted past, may end up costing her everything.

Startling, inventive, and profoundly moving, The Morningside is a novel about the stories we tell, and the stories we refuse to tell, to make sense of where we came from, and who we hope we might become.

Téa Obreht is the internationally bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, which won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her second novel, Inland, was an instant bestseller, won the Southwest Book Award, and was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, she now resides in Wyoming.

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.