“Reading this at the age of 13, I understood that fantasy, the place I was looking for, is not to be found in dragons, ghosts, or magic wands. It resides in language. Fantasy is death by owls. It’s mourning through gesture. It’s music, incantation in half-light. An inverted heart.” — An excerpt from one of my …
After idolising her for quite literally my entire existence upon this Earth, I had the ridiculous privilege of meeting Carrie Fisher a fortnight before she died. I spent three hours beside her signing table for The Princess Diarist in London, managing the queue, listening to adoring fans stumbling over themselves in the frenetic rush to …
“I am the end and the beginning. The world is a painting and I hold the brush. I am a god.” This book is dedicated to the readers who stayed with the series until the end and came prepared with a bucket for their tears… Words to heed. I wrote out all my book 3 …
Timidity creates nothing. I’ve had this one on an IV drip for the last two months and it would not be hyperbole to say it’s been quite literally anchoring my sanity. Before, I couldn’t possibly have imagined it landing with anywhere near the stratospheric impact of The Song of Achilles. Because how could it? Reader, …
This was my pivot point, my moment of self-arrest. Like a climber about to slip off an icy peak, I drove my axe into the ground. Despite coming from one of the public figures closest in proximity to the heart of US politics over the last two decades, Becoming is far from a political polemic. …
“I listened, and did not speak. Achilles’ eyes were bright in the firelight, his face drawn sharply by the flickering shadows. I would know it in dark, or disguise, I told myself. I would know it even in madness.” And so finally, after nigh on 24 years of existence, I have found the perfect book. …
“I thought I brought peace.” “You brought victory,” he said. “This is what happens after.” So The Poppy War trilogy is, bounded in a nutshell, Avatar: The Last Airbender if the main character was Azula and everyone was on acid (as RFK described it herself in her glorious 88 Cups of Tea interview with interviewer …
“We can endure any amount of sadness for the people we love.” The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco is a richly-wrought dark fantasy that follows the titular witch, Tea of the Embers, as she trains to be an asha, the Geisha-like mages whose powers range in this world from the elemental to the necromantic. Plucked …
“All the years and miles and blood and wrong between them. There wasn’t a hole in creation deep enough to bury it all. So she’d bury him instead.” And so ends the chronicle… My soul is riven. I’ve been through a nuclear-powered blender the past week devouring this broiling tome… The Nevernight Chronicle has some …
“Reading this at the age of 13, I understood that fantasy, the place I was looking for, is not to be found in dragons, ghosts, or magic wands. It resides in language. Fantasy is death by owls. It’s mourning through gesture. It’s music, incantation in half-light. An inverted heart.” — An excerpt from one of my …
Ever wanted your Brontës with blood tithe magic, plesiosaurs, and sisters of sappho? LOOK NO FURTHER. I first heard of this book at YALC 2019 and devoured the sampler in about 5 minutes. This was a fantasy world unlike anything I had read before. There were airships and automobiles that put me in mind of …
“And, in this staunch little portrait, it’s hard not to see the human in the finch. Dignified, vulnerable. One prisoner looking at another. But who knows what Fabritius intended? There’s not enough of his work left to even make a guess. The bird looks out at us. It’s not idealized or humanized. It’s very much …
“Then the storm broke, and the dragons danced.” The scorching behemoth that is Fire and Blood is a sweeping history of the Targaryens from Aegon the Conqueror right through to Aegon III told from the perspective of Archmaester Gyldayn of the Citadel by way of a variety of primary sources including Mushroom the dwarf, who …
“War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.” My RF Kuang obsession began last November at the Foyles SFX book con when she fended off the absolute pinnacle trashfire line of comment-not-questioning I’ve ever witnessed at a book event. The panel was on Tolkienesque fantasy, and instead of using the professor as a springboard …
“This was why he had done it, not because of guilt or pride but because this was the moment he’d been waiting for: the chance to show someone else wonder, to watch them realise that they had not been lied to, that the world they’d been promised as children was not something that had to …
“Let others become gods of mere single worlds. She herself would stride the stars and head up the pantheon.” Thousands of years in the future, the last dregs of humanity launch a mighty fleet of generational ark ships from the war-ravaged and dying Earth in one desperate attempt to send groups of sleeping scientists soaring …
“How about you cut the crud, give me the info and I’ll get this done myself?”He paused, clasping his arms behind his back and looking above him as if for inspiration. “Are you a particularly – calm person?” She took a deep breath. “I take your point. But if I have to learn how to gruddamn fly for this …
“Go tell that long tongue liar, go and tell that midnight rider, tell the rambler, the gambler, the backbiter, tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down.” …is the epigraph to this dark little book. I’ve been thinking about it all week as the Monty Python episode playing out in parliament enters its forty eighth …
Where to even begin? It’s taken me days to transmute the storm this book wreaks on the heart into coherent words. I had to stay in Euston station for an extra hour after I got back from my last trip home to Scotland to just sit and absorb the final fifty pages. It was nearing …
“Reading this at the age of 13, I understood that fantasy, the place I was looking for, is not to be found in dragons, ghosts, or magic wands. It resides in language. Fantasy is death by owls. It’s mourning through gesture. It’s music, incantation in half-light. An inverted heart.” — An excerpt from one of my …
