Price: £20.00 Fiction: FICTION / Fantasy / Historical Product format: Hardback ISBN: 978-1-80552-020-7 Pages: 336 Imprint: FLAME TREE PRESS
Blurb
Mairead and Constance, two powerful witches, meet in the early days of the 1745 Jacobite uprising. While the men of the village are away fighting, the villagers face threats from both the Black Watch and raiders, and the women are confronted with their vulnerability. They enlist the help of Nicnevin, fae queen of witches, to bring men made of earth to life to help protect their village. But just who do they need protection from? And what will happen when the village men return?
This morning I received an ARC of The Girl With A Thousand Faces from Sunyi Dean, that came with a letter about the book, a ghost talisman and a flyer about the official book launch in May.
Earlier in the week I received a book I ordered after seeing it on a Good Reads list and liking the sound of it, Dead Silence, by S.A. Barnes. I think I had to get it from the Netherlands.
And I’ve also received two of the books I’m reviewing in January for Random Things Tours.
The Girl In The Tower, by Harrison Murphy, 13th January 2026 – stand alone novel
The Hope, by Paul E. Hardest, 26th January 2026 – final book in a trilogy
And of course, BFS Horizons #18 has arrived from the BFS!
Publisher Independently published Publication date 5 Aug. 2025 Language English Print length 284 pages ISBN-13 979-8284534489
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Murder has come to the city of Tronte…
Holtar didn’t become a necromancer for the prestige—he did it because talking to the dead is marginally easier than dealing with the living. Unfortunately, his latest case has given him a fresh problem: the corpses aren’t talking.
The first fantasy-writing textbook to combine a historical genre overview with an anthology and comprehensive craft guide, this book explores the blue prints of one of the most popular forms of genre fiction. The first section will acquaint readers with the vast canon of existing fantasy fiction and outline the many sub-genres encompassed within it before examining the important relationship between fantasy and creative writing, the academy and publishing. A craft guide follows which equips students with the key concepts of storytelling as they are impacted by writing through a fantastical lens. These
– Character and dialogue – Point of view – Plot and structure – Worldbuilding settings, ideologies and cultures – Style and revision
The third section guides students through the spectrum of styles as they are classified in fantasy fiction from Epic and high fantasy, through Lovecraftian and Weird fiction, to magical realism and hybrid fantasy. An accompanying anthology will provide students with a greater awareness of the range of possibilities open to them as fantasy writers and will feature such writers as Ursula Le Guin, China Miéville, Theodora Goss, Emrys Donaldson, Ken Liu, C.S.E. Cooney, Vandana Singh, Sofia Samatar, Rebecca Roanhorse, Jessie Ulmer, Yxta Maya Murray, and Rachael K. Jones. With writing exercises, prompts, additional online resources and cues for further reading throughout, this is an essential resource for anyone wanting to write fantastical fiction.
Format 344 pages, Paperback Published January 11, 2024 by Bloomsbury Academic ISBN 978135016692
From an electrifying new voice in epic fantasy comes The Raven Scholar, a masterfully woven and playfully inventive tale of imperial intrigue, cutthroat competition, and one scholar’s quest to uncover the truth.
Let us fly now to the empire of Orrun, where after twenty-four years of peace, Bersun the Brusque must end his reign. In the dizzying heat of mid-summer, seven contenders compete to replace him. They are exceptional warriors, thinkers, strategists—the best of the best.
Then one of them is murdered.
It falls to Neema Kraa, the emperor’s brilliant, idiosyncratic High Scholar, to find the killer before the trials end. To do so, she must untangle a web of deadly secrets that stretches back generations, all while competing against six warriors with their own dark histories and fierce ambitions. Neema believes she is alone. But we are here to help; all she has to do is let us in.
If she succeeds, she will win the throne. If she fails, death awaits her. But we won’t let that happen.
We are the Raven, and we are magnificent.
Format 672 pages, Paperback Published April 15, 2025 by Orbit ISBN 9780316577229
I’ve got the WordPress app on my phone now, so instead of copy/paste I photograph!
My Review
I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Stone & Sky, but I needed to go into town today so I visited Waterstones and got their only copy. It’s a signed special edition and I rather like the cover and end papers.
The fish scale pattern is rather subtle on the paper cover but you can just about see it in the photo. It’s mirrored on the end papers.
I’ve got a few Rivers of London books, and I’ve read every novel, novella and graphic novel. I’ve read quite a few of the short stories too. It’s getting to the point that my collection may need it’s own shelf in the library. When I get another bookshelf. I’m running out of space.
On this installment of Peter’s adventures, the gang go on a holiday to Aberdeenshire. Thomas, Abi, and the foxes are hunting a mysterious panther; Abdul is visiting his old friend and fellow weird creature hobbyist, Brian; Beverly decided it was time for a holiday for her, Peter and their twins, while Peter’s mum was supposed to be their babysitter. Since Peter’s dad can’t be left unsupervised, he came along, with his jazz band and their dodgy manager.
Peter gets dragged into a murder case, which becomes a missing person case, while Abi deals with her grief for her brother by hiding in trees photographing magic panthers from other worlds, until she falls in love with a mermaid. At which point she gets dragged into the same case Peted is investigating from a different angle.
Turns out, if you kidnap selkies and force them to work, and the local mermaids are involved, it gets dangerous for everyone. There’s a kraken in the North Sea, apparently. No one actually blows up an oil platform, but it gets close.
Peter doesn’t have any legal status as a copper in Scotland, so he’s got a new mate, DS Blansheil, who gets to learn all about the weird stuff on the job. Between then they attempt to capture a giant gull with teeth, intimidate oil industry execs, and taser an American practitioner, before heading to an oil platform to find a missing person. There’s a couple of wyvern attacks, too.
The story is told by Peter and Abigail as they go about their parallel investigations and adventures. The voice actors who play them in the audiobook do convincing Aberdonian and other Scottish accents, as well as London accents. As far as I can tell. I’m unfamiliar with both but the vernacular seems correct, and Aaronovitch does name a lot of local experts who advised him.
I do like the sound of a macaroni cheese pie, although I think my blood vessels would object (heavy pastry gives me a headache and too many carbs hurt my abdomen), so if I ever make it to Aberdeen I’ll avoid that particular local delicacy.
The story starts out fairly simply – what Peter did on his summer holidays – and becomes increasingly complex until there are multiple investigations and lots of new characters. Even the foxes get in on the act. The ones in Scotland apparently own a car, driven by a merman (well, mermaid teenager, Duncan isn’t technically legal to drive).
I followed the thread of the story quite well and I enjoyed the developments in familial relationships and friendships. Also, the twins are adorable. They are going to run Peter ragged.
Abi is becoming more of a main character with her foxes and her new girlfriend; her grief for her brother Paul dominates until she is distracted by Ione, who offers her support and a release, which allows her to cry as much as she needs to. By the end of the novel she has started to process her pain and, although she still has suicidal ideation, she is looking towards the future.
Aaronovitch draws on all sorts of folklore and mythology to people his stories, often with a new twist – mermaids who live on land and transform in the sea, selkies who can’t shed their skin and wouldn’t survive long out of the water. Although they do bark like seals. Kraken who guard baby selkies. River gods who try to act tough but look a bit daft. I enjoyed his takes on the folklore he draws on and it takes his stories to interesting places.
I am also amused by Peter’s Discworld and Lord of the Rings references. I picked up several, but the one from GUARDS! GUARDS! was particularly good. I may have missed references to other worlds, but I definitely got those.
There were bits of the story that seemed not to flow, like Ione suddenly coming back into the narrative as Abi runs down the tunnel or Beverly reappearing on the diving platform. Since the narrative is written in first person it adds to the feeling of confusion that the characters are narrating, but I had to reread a couple of times to work out what was going on.
Other than minor confusions at the climax of their individual investigations, I found this book an excellent addition to the Rivers of London universe.
In the dying port town of Gdansburg, Sir Konrad Vonvalt finds the unthinkable: a fellow Justice imprisoned for the murder of a young boy. Despite the furious insistence of the townsfolk, the only evidence is a question written on a piece of paper by a dead man: what is The Scour?
The answer begins in the town’s haunted lighthouse and ends in its past–where Vonvalt may dig up more than he bargained for.
When her cousin gets kidnapped by a dastardly trickster, Luzia is forced to sell herself in servitude to the Eoi in exchange for his life. But the terms of the deal turn out to be much more complicated than she ever imagined…
Luzia N.E. Drainway never really thought too much about the Astrosi. They lurk above and below Bastion City – a giant multileveled megalopolis she calls her home – and they tend to keep to themselves. On the rare occasions they use their magics to meddle with human affairs, most people with an ounce of sense steer clear of whichever unfortunate soul happens to be their victim. Luzia is far too dedicated to repairing and maintaining the frequently-damaged Bastion to pay them much attention, and prefers to ignore the Astrosi just like everyone else.
That disregard gets blown out of the water when a rogue Astrosi and nefarious trickster named Carrion kidnaps her nephew and sells him to the Eoi, one of the Astrosi courts.
With no other options to save her nephew, Luzia trades her life for his and finds herself in service to the Eoi. Unfortunately for her, Astrosi logic is acrobatic in ways even the most devious human mind can barely comprehend. It’s not until the deal is struck that she realizes she’s trapped in the most abstruse verbal contract imaginable. She is essentially conscripted into their ranks, and her devotion to her city becomes stretched to breaking point by her new masters’ orders.
As she struggles under this weight, she begins to uncover the secrets of the Astrosi people – the internal battles for power between the two kingdoms, the never-ending conflict between them, the trickster Carrion who somehow bridges that gap, and the very nature of the Bastion itself.
From sci-fi visionary and acclaimed author Annalee Newitz comes Automatic Noodle, a cosy near-future novella about a crew of abandoned food service bots opening their very own restaurant.
While San Francisco rebuilds from the chaos of war, a group of food service bots in an abandoned ghost kitchen take over their own delivery app account. They rebrand as a neighborhood lunch spot and start producing some of the tastiest hand-pulled noodles in the city. But there’s just one problem. Someone―or something―is review bombing the restaurant’s feedback page with fake “bad service” reports. Can the bots find the culprit before their ratings plummet and destroy everything they created?
My Review
It’s 2064. California has fought a war of Independence from the United States, and has freed robots above a certain level of intelligence. Well, not really free, they can’t own property, reproduce, or have bank accounts. Their licenses can be bought and sold, tying them to contracts and companies that can take them apart for scrap or sell them on saddled with debt. So not free at all.
Staybehind is an ex-military robot, free from contract and working wherever it wants. It happened to be working as manager of a terrible fast food franchise when it was shut down. Hands, the chef bot, Sweetie the front desk bot, and Cayenne, a former search and rescue octobot turned gastronome who likes to taste and smell food, slowly wake up after Staybehind is alerted to an emergency – their store is flooding. Once they work out what’s going on, the group make the decision to run the store for themselves, if they can find a way around the laws. Cayenne is on that.
Together with a human called Robles and an automatic minivan called Sloan, the robots go into business for themselves selling noodles. After a great review they get very busy, but then another review outs them as robots and starts review bombing the food delivery app everyone uses. While Staybehind searches for the culprit and discovers they have an artistic streak, Cayenne and Sweetie come up with other plans.
It’s a novella. I’ve read it in less than 3 hours this afternoon. I’d planned to go swimming but my lungs decided otherwise, so I’ve spent the afternoon on the sofa reading. I’m going back to bed as soon as I’ve written this because I’m sick once again!
I’ve read Annalee Newitz’s books in the past and enjoyed them; the author always seems to find the right tone for the subject and the right themes for the times. This is the case with Automatic Noodle too, with themes of found family, community resilience, and post-war rebuilding. The robots are stand-ins for the groups currently demonised by the right in the U.S. (and the U.K. honestly) – trans people, migrants, minority groups. There’s even a nod to the way African Americans were treated for the century between the end of the U.S. Civil War and the Civil Rights Act, in the way HEEI robots, and all robots, are treated.
The characters of Staybehind, Hands, Cayenne and Sweetie are all rounded, with backstories shared in vignettes. Reading them as they grow as people, and develop a community around them, facing their fears and the past, was sweet.
I think this is the sort of story we need right now. Things are going bad in the U.S., the U.K. government keeps pandering to the Right instead of telling them to go fuck themselves, and it’s scary for a lot of people. Me included. This novella is a story of hope – in community and community building, we can survive and thrive. I would read an expanded version of this novella or a sequel.
Format: 448 pages, Paperback Published: March 26, 2019 by Tor ISBN: 9781529001587
Ambassador Mahit Dzmare arrives in the center of the multi-system Teixcalaanli Empire only to discover that her predecessor, the previous ambassador from their small but fiercely independent mining Station, has died. But no one will admit that his death wasn’t an accident—or that Mahit might be next to die, during a time of political instability in the highest echelons of the imperial court.
Now, Mahit must discover who is behind the murder, rescue herself, and save her Station from Teixcalaan’s unceasing expansion—all while navigating an alien culture that is all too seductive, engaging in intrigues of her own, and hiding a deadly technological secret—one that might spell the end of her Station and her way of life—or rescue it from annihilation.
My Review
This is another one from my TBR Pile that I’ve been meaning to read for years. I finally sat down and read it a week or so ago.
Mahit is a 26 year old Stationer, sent to the imperial capital of Teixcalaan as Ambassador. There, she finds her predecessor has been murdered and then her implant with his memory on it breaks, leaving her flailing around without help. Her only ally is her cultural attaché, Seagrass. They are blown up, held prisoner by a friend of the old ambassador, and have to get help from rebels, as the Emperor weakens and several successors fight for the throne. Eventually, Mahit hears from a possible ally on her Station that aliens are attacking human space, and this is enough for the Emperor to bring a halt to the fighting at home by focusing forces on the alien threat, and away from Stationer space.
Mahit and Seagrass go through some terrifying events but the writing is so good that every emotional turn is understandable. Her immersion in a culture that she previously thought she knew so well when she was studying it, but finds so confusing in person, really captures the dislocation of immersion in a new culture. Without her imago to guide her, Mahit doesn’t have the local knowledge that she’d need to fit it, and she is made to feel alien and not quite human because she is not Teicalaanlitzlim. She is an amusing barbarian to her hosts. Mahit does use this to her advantage, and sometimes disadvantage, in the complex court of the Emperor.
I enjoyed the narrative, structure, and tone of this novel. It explores empire from the perspective of an outsider, showing the hypocrisy of imperial states. The descriptions of the city and the people are rich and detailed. There is a hint of both the Byzantine and the Aztec empires in the descriptions of the clothes, culture and architecture, but the living conditions in the out regions of the city feel more Victorian London. The author has clearly drawn on many sources but it feels cohesive and inspired by those sources, rather than direct copying.
I enjoyed this book, and I can see why it’s so lauded. I’ve started book two, so expect a review of A Desolation Called Peace at some point.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 