Archives de catégorie : Fantasy

FORM AND VOID d’A.J. Smith

‘Convincing action sequences, vivid world-building and fascinating magic. Best described as George RR Martin meets HP Lovecraft, The Glass Breaks is a fine example of British fantasy writing at its most entertaining’ The Guardian.

FORM AND VOID
by A.J. Smith
Head of Zeus, 2019 – 2022
(via Northbank Talent Management)

Book One – THE GLASS BREAKS (June 2019)

Seventeen-year-old Duncan Greenfire is alive. Three hours ago, he was chained to the rocks and submerged as the incoming tide washed over his head. Now the waters are receding and Duncan’s continued survival has completed his initiation as a Sea Wolf.

It is the 167th year of the Dark Age. The Sea Wolves and their Eastron kin can break the glass and step into the void, slipping from the real world and reappearing wherever they wish. Wielding their power, they conquered the native Pure Ones and established their own Kingdom.

The Sea Wolves glorify in piracy and slaughter. Their rule is absolute, but young Duncan Greenfire and duellist Adeline Brand will discover a conspiracy to end their dominion, a conspiracy to shatter the glass that separates the worlds of Form and Void and unleash a primeval chaos across the world.

Book Two – THE SWORD FALLS (March 2021)

A man of the dawn claw will be the always king.

It will ever be so. They will always rule… but they will not always lead.

Prince Oliver Dawn Claw, heir to the Kingdom of the Four Claws, is thrust into a world he doesn’t understand as he waits for his father to die. Away from home, with few allies – and too many enemies – he faces a new and otherworldly threat from beneath the sea. Alliances break and masks fall, as the Dark Brethren reveal their true master.

Meanwhile, Adeline Brand – called the Alpha Wolf – refuses to wait, and becomes the edge of the sword that swings back at the Dreaming God. Assembling allies and crushing resistance, she enters a fight she doesn’t know if she can win, as the sea begins to rise.

Book Three – THE SEA RISES (March 2022)

Ages end and the sea rises. As the sea rises, so too does the old world.

Lord Marius Cyclone faces an unimaginable danger. The mighty legions of Santago Cyclone – known as the Bloodied Harp – and King Oliver Dawn Claw will be upon the Dark Harbour in less than a day, and truce seems impossible, even as the end of the world of Form creeps ever nearer.

But the tide waits for no man. Marius has only one choice if his people are to survive: flight, into the Void.

All the while, a primal power awakens. The Sunken God has lived through many ages and watched countless civilisations rise and fall. And he will not let his quarry flee without a fight.

AJ Smith is a teacher and youth worker based in Luton, England.

A BETTER NIGHTMARE de Megan Freeman

A dark and absorbing allegory for the power that young people possess in their bones to change things that feel far bigger than them, A Better Nightmare is a whirlwind adventure — a story of friendship, romance, and a radical crusade for one group of teens to fight for their right to feel.

A BETTER NIGHTMARE
by Megan Freeman
Chicken House/Scholastic, March 2025
(via Northbank Talent Management)

If the entire world believes in a lie, does that make it the truth?

Emily Emerson is nearly sixteen, finally a senior at the Wildsmoor Facility. But so is Meera, isn’t she? Meera, who is nineteen and has been a senior for as long as Emily can remember? Here, the students live each day as shadows, one day blurring into the next, hardly aware of life passing them by while the symptoms of the Grimm Cross Syndrome that afflicts them all is trained out of them. Rules. Order. Repetition. Medication.

Emily was eight when she started showing signs of the disease. Odd dreams, hallucinations – impossible things that happened around her. Unconscious thoughts that could be set free into the world—flowers that covered the house, thick like a forest and sowed with nothing more than her unconscious thoughts. It was beautiful until it turned evil, when Emily did her first bad thing and found herself here. Now, she’ll do anything to get better and get back to her life. She’ll be more quiet and obedient than everyone else.

Until she meets Emir.

Emir isn’t like the other kids at Wildsmoor. He’s quicker and livelier. He says things that he shouldn’t – dangerous things. Emir is electric, magnetic in more ways than Emily can know.

When Emir introduces her to The Cure, a secret society for kids who believe that The Grimm isn’t a disease at all, but a gift, Emily starts to wake up, and so do her strange abilities. The outcome is a dream come true. But sometimes the best dreams and the worst nightmares have the same people in them.

Megan Freeman writes young adult fiction and loves all things magic and mythology. She juggles writing with her day job working for a children’s mental health charity, promoting wellbeing through surf therapy. Megan hails from the far west of Cornwall, and when she’s not working or writing, loves tramping around the moorland and swimming or surfing in the sea.

MARE OF NIGHT d’Emma Noyes

First of a YA fantasy romance trilogy by bestselling author of Guy’s Girl Emma Noyes, for fans of ‘The Vampire Diaries’ and Norse mythology.

MARE OF NIGHT
(Ragnarok Rising #1)
by Emma Noyes
Wednesday Books, late 2023 TBD
(via The Whalen Agency)

Book 1: MARE OF NIGHT

Charlie Hudson just wants to get through junior year. Since the death of her twin sister two years before, she has drifted through life, robbed of the spark that once burned so brightly within her—until the day her first classmate goes missing. Drawn to the disappearances by forces she can’t explain, Charlie soon finds herself investigating the mysterious, alluring newcomer in town, Elias Everhart. She knows Elias is hiding something, but what she doesn’t know is that those secrets will lead her to a place she never imagined: a world hiding in plain sight, made of magic, gods, and monsters—and a first love fated to fall apart.

Book 2: LIES OF LOKI and Book 3: SINS OF ODIN to follow.

Emma Noyes told her mother she wanted to be an author when she was six. She grew up in a suburb outside Chicago and attended Harvard University, where she studied history & literature. She started her career at a beer company, but left because she wanted to write about mermaids and witches—eventually publishing her first YA fantasy series, The Sunken City. She now lives in Chicago with her Swedish boyfriend and miniature Pomeranian. Guy’s Girl, her adult debut, will publish in October 2023.

FOR LOVE OF MAGIC de Simon R. Green

History isn’t what you think it is. It’s been rewritten to remove all the magic. Together, two people decide to put things right. A new novel of magic, history and true love from Simon R. Green.

FOR LOVE OF MAGIC
by Simon R. Green
Baen, May 2023
(via JABberwocky)

When they fall in love, it’s magic!
History can change and has changed. Magic was and is real.
Once upon a time, there was a forgotten era of magic and monster. But the remnants—and all memory—of the old world have been replaced by the sane, the scientific, and the rational. But sometimes the magical past isn’t content to stay past. That’s where Jack Daimon comes in. It’s his joy to protect our present from the supernatural remnants of an earlier time, a different history. It’s his job to make the past safe.
Jack is called to the Tate Museum, where dozens of people have disappeared beneath the surface of a painting. While investigating, he finds himself smitten with a mysterious art expert, Amanda Fielding. But Amanda has plans of her own, and soon the two are traveling through time—back to the Roman Empire and then forward through history, from King Arthur’s court to Sherwood Forest. As they explore histories past as written and overwritten, the balance of magic and science shifts, and the choices the two make could change the world forever.

Simon R. Green is the New York Times best-selling author of more than sixty science fiction, fantasy, and mystery novels. Green sold his first book in 1988 and the very next year was commissioned to write the best-selling novelization of the Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. From there he went on to write many more series of books, including Deathstalker, Nightside, Secret History, Forest Kingdom, and the Ishmael Jones mysteries. His books have sold more than 3.8 million copies worldwide and have been translated into more than a dozen different languages.

CATCHPENNY de Charlie Huston

A thief who can travel through mirrors, a video game that threatens to spill out of the virtual world, a doomsday cult on a collision course with destiny, and a missing teenager at the center of it all. With the world on the brink of every kind of apocalypse, humanity needs a hero. What it gets is Sid Catchpenny.

CATCHPENNY
by Charlie Huston
Vintage, November 2023
(via Writers House)

Sidney Catchpenny has had a bad run. Laid low by a yearslong bout of debilitating depression, he’s all but squandered his reputation as one of the most uniquely talented thieves in LA. There aren’t many who can do what Sid does. He’s a sly, a special kind of crook with the uncanny ability to move through mirrors. And the spoils he’s after are equally unusual. Forget jewels and cold cash—Sid steals curiosities—items imbued with powerful mojo, a magical essence gleaned from the accumulated emotion that seeps into interesting, though often often banal objects. That spot on the carpet where your old dog used to lay at your feet? The passed-down family heirloom nobody wants but everybody refuses to throw away? These curiosities are full of mojo, which is both the currency of the criminal underground and the secret source of magic in the world.
When a friend from Sid’s past comes looking for his help with an important client, and the chance to pay off old debts presents itself, Sid seizes the opportunity … as best he can. But the case he stumbles into is more complicated than it seems, and it portends a seismic shift in the world, one that will leave no one untouched. As the fog of his depression begins to lift, Sid sees connections everywhere he looks, and the once disparate threads of the case—a missing teenage girl, an entire bedroom saturated with mojo, and Sid’s own long-dead wife—begin to coalesce.

“I absolutely loved it. CATCHPENNY is a brilliant book, full of heart and the language is pitch-perfect. If Elmore Leonard had ever written a fantasy novel, this would be it. It’s got a much keener edge than most fantasy novels, and the characters rock.” —Stephen King

Charlie Huston is the author of the bestsellers The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death and The Shotgun Rule, as well as the Henry Thompson trilogy, the Joe Pitt casebooks, and several titles for Marvel Comics.