“Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, …
“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 …
“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 …
“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 …
“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 …
The moment Marcella Morgan melts the face off her husband in VE Schwab’s Vengeful you know you’re in for a veritable five-course feast of a treat. She lifted an empty glass from the table. “To my husband,” she said, right before the ruin rushed to her fingers in a blossom of red light. Five years in …
Her voice was war conch and whale song and the distant rumble of a storm, all smoothed into words like glass shaped by the sea. YOU BETTER BELIEVE THAT IS THE DESCRIPTION OF A DRAGON’S VOICE. BIBLIOPHILES ASSEMBLE Ok… so, know that I speak as a galactic supernerd with two Tolkien tattoos who hails from …
Some earth is worth shattering… I can’t believe this is my very first sojourn into the scintillating realms of World Fantasy, Hugo, and Nebula Award-winning SFF Queen Nnedi Okorafor, but I emerged from under my rock to devour it in a couple of days. One of the most magical stories I’ve ever read, The Shadow …
The Bone Season saga is a bewitchingly idiosyncratic steampunk-sci-fi-fantasy hybrid – after binging all three books currently out in the world, my imagination is reeling. The brain really does feel warm after finishing, like the body after a sumptuous roast… gravy-drenched Yorkshire puddings, turkey slices dipped in cranberry sauce, steaming brussels sprouts, peas and potatoes, …
This is a deliciously dark book. Like steaming fillet steak soaked in peppercorn sauce with roast potatoes, buttered runner beans, and a glass of Merlot delicious. You know you’re reading Schwab by the second sentence, when the slender figure of Victor Vale sweeps through a cemetery at night, his billowing trench coat brushing the tops …
‘Stas reskon’ means ‘chasing danger’ in Arnesian, the language of Red London. It occurs in Book 2 of VE Schwab’s incandescent Shades of Magic series, A Gathering of Shadows, when the badass seamster and quirkily maternal Calla applies it to our relentlessly independent protagonist Lila Bard. It’s my favourite Arnesian phrase and captures in totality …
