Release Date: 30/04/13
Publisher: Orbit
SYNOPSIS:
The great war cannot be stopped. The tyrant Geder Palliako begins a conquest aimed at bringing peace to the world, though his resources are stretched too thin. When things go poorly, he finds a convenient target among the thirteen races and sparks a genocide. Clara Kalliam, freed by having fallen from grace, remakes herself as a "loyal traitor" and starts building an underground resistance movement that seeks to undermine Geder through those closest to him. Cithrin bel Sarcour is apprenticing in a city that's taken over by Antea, and uses her status as Geder's one-time lover to cover up an underground railroad smuggling refugees to safety. And Marcus Wester and Master Kit race against time and Geder Palliako's men in an attempt to awaken a force that could change the fate of the world.
REVIEW:
I love a cracking fantasy where I can not only get lost in the world but have fun trudging with the adventurers within so that I can get a fuller picture and for me Daniel Abraham has delivered that a lot of the time when I read his work. Here in the latest outing is a book that takes you on one hell of an adventure as the great war grinds its way across the land. It’s dark, it has a lot of characters to cheer for within and whilst our heroes do their utmost to try and finish a quest to save the world from itself, it’s a title that has hope scattered throughout the pages.
As usual with Daniels writing the prose is sharp, the dialogue wonderfully delicious and when backed with a plot line that has a good sense of pace to it there’s really not much more a reader could ask for, add to the mix, danger lurking around many corners and all round its one that will rend the readers emotions as it takes so much with one hand whilst giving a balm with the other. Great stuff.
Release Date: 03/05/12
SYNOPSIS:
War casts its shadow over the lands that the dragons once ruled. Only the courage of a young woman with the mind of a gambler and loyalty to no one stands between hope and universal darkness. The high and powerful will fall, the despised and broken shall rise up and everything will be remade. And an old, broken-hearted warrior and an apostate priest will begin a terrible journey with an impossible goal: destroy a Goddess before she eats the world.
REVIEW:
I’ve been a fan of Daniel’s writing style for quite a while now and to be honest when I know that theres a new one coming out, I’m not only demanding it for myself but I’ve also got that fantasy monster that introduced me to the genre hanging on out to get his paws upon the text as soon as possible. (Yep that was my Dad in case you needed to know. LOL)
Why? Well Daniel’s writing style is addictive with its wonderful use of characters, politics and of course prose as it brings the reader deeper within his world to see events as they unfurl. Its fast paced, fascinating and with the machinations and character developments within the text makes this a tale to fully savour and enjoy over the nights, possibly with your favourite tipple. Great stuff all in.
Release Date: 05/01/12
SYNOPSIS:
The first novel in a bold and fast-paced new urban fantasy series starring Jayné Heller, a young college student who inherits a string of houses across the world, several bank accounts, and a very unconventional business from her murdered uncle. And it turns out Uncle Eric has been fighting to rid the world of supernatural riders - demons, vampires, werewolves and all sorts of other nasty parasites - since before Jayné was born. Now it's up to Jayné to avenge her uncle's death and continue his mission - if she can survive her first week on the job.
REVIEW:
Originally I thought that MLN Hanover was a new author so I was really looking forward to seeing what would occur in a paranormal genre that’s heavily laden with almost mythical heroes, vamps and of course magic weilders, so when I learned that the name was a pseudonym for an author whose fantasy titles I loved I was a little apprehensive as I didn’t want to ruin my own reading pleasure with a title that didn’t fit into what they did.
What unfurled however was a well thought out, cunningly crafted title with a new take on magic, were’s and other “riders” which made this a tale that I could really get my teeth into and when added with a good sense of prose, some decent action and a whole host of chaos with casualties based on the lead characters choices I found it a story I couldn’t leave alone. Add to this some interesting dialogue which when backed with all the traits that I like from Daniel Abraham’s writing (solid characters having to deal with a world that’s given them lemons) with a good dash of flaws and it was a story that left me wanting more. I’ll look forward to seeing where it goes.
Release Date: 21/04/11
SYNOPSIS:
The dragons are gone, the powerful magics that broke the world diluted to little more than parlour tricks, but the kingdoms of men remain and the great game of thrones goes on. Lords deploy armies and merchant caravans as their weapons, manoeuvring for wealth and influence. But a darker power is rising - an unlikely leader with an ancient ally threatens to unleash again the madness that destroyed the world once already. Only one man knows the truth and, from the shadows, must champion humanity. The world's fate stands on the edge of a Dagger, its future on the toss of a Coin ...
REVIEW:
As a fan of Daniels other titles I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this, his brand new series. As you’d expect the writing is crisp, the characters memorable and they stand out as a cast that have learned from their pasts and try to influence their futures for their own betterment. It’s cleverly done and when war is in the offing, it matters not how much you try to do to avoid it, you’ll always be drawn in one way or another.
Add to this crisp prose, some great descriptiveness and some magical abilities and afflictions that will make this book stand out for quite some time. Finally as this tale unfurls the reader may find themselves slightly confused as the multitude of cultures populating this small world but each adds a unique flavour as well as perspective upon not only the frailty of the conditions within but also a deeper flavour to help bring this world alive. Wonderfully done and I’ll look forward to the next part.
Renowned as a short story writer, author Daniel Abraham has really grabbed the world of fantasy by the short and curlies with his Long Road series.
Here we chatted to the author about writing, the tortured author effect and how he deals with being "left 4 dead"...Falcata Times: Writing is said to be something that people are afflicted with rather than gifted and that it's something you have to do rather than want. What is your opinion of this statement and how true is it to you?Daniel Abraham: I'm leery of the tortured artist effect. Certainly writing is important to me, and if I go too long without, I get cranky. But in this, I think it's much like any passion. It's as likely true to say that a love of dog agility trials or gourmet cooking is something with which you are afflicted, and that those for whom it is a passion have to do it.FT: When did you realise that you wanted to be a writer?DA: I was twelve, I think. I had an assignment to write a story for a class and did a sort of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" for the preteen mindset. I remember that I had a couple of friends at the time who mocked the assignment and implicitly invited me to be loyal to them instead of -- essentially -- my homework. I chose my homework. I wasn't a particularly brave boy, and the decision to betray my friends wasn't lightly taken. It seems a small thing now, but it was momentous enough that I still remember it now. FT: It is often said that if you can write a short story you can write anything. How true do you think this is and what have you written that either proves or disproves this POV?DA: I disagree. If you can write a short story, you can write a short story. I wrote short stories for years and published several of them before I wrote a novel worth reading. And having written several novels doesn't teach me how to write a play or a script for film of comic books. There are some basic skills that short stories are good for teaching, but structure doesn't scale. As for what I've written that supports me in this, I have several novels in my files that will attest to my inability to write them even after I'd managed some decent short work.FT: If someone were to enter a bookshop, how would you persuade them to try your novel over someone else's and how would you define it?DA: If I were trying to sell someone on the Long Price books, I'd say that they were a genuinely new take on epic fantasy. An unusual structure, an unusual setting, well-written, and with four essentially stand-alone stories that added up to a much larger story. And then I'd probably die of embarrassment from having puffed myself up over any number of other very good books.FT: How would you "sell" your book in 20 words or less?DA: "Abraham is fiercely talented, disturbingly human, breathtakingly original and even on his bad days kicks all sorts of literary ass." -- Junot Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. FT: Who is a must have on your bookshelf and whose latest release will find you on the bookshops doorstep waiting for it to open?DA: Graham Joyce. I keep his books as rewards for doing chores I hate and projects that I don't enjoy. The prospect of curling up for a night with his newest book will get me through almost any amount of overdue housework. I've also developed a thing for Jo Walton. FT: When you sit down and write do you know how the story will end or do you just let the pen take you? ie Do you develop character profiles and outlines for your novels before writing them or do you let your idea's develop as you write?DA: If I just "let the ideas develop," it's with the understanding that I'm just noodling around, and that I will destroy that draft and write another one after I've figured out what I'm doing. I almost always know where I'm starting and where I'm heading toward. If the middle bits are a little fuzzy until I get there, that's fine. If the details shift around on me . . . well that's what second drafts are for.
FT: What do you do to relax and what have you read recently?DA: To relax, I walk or avoid housework. Most recently, I've read Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, Connie Willis' Bellwether, and Tana French's The Likeness. FT: What is your guiltiest pleasure that few know about?DA: Left 4 Dead. I have come to console gaming late in life, and almost exclusively for the pleasure of shooting zombies. FT: Lots of writers tend to have pets. What do you have and what are their key traits (and do they appear in your novel in certain character attributes?)DA: I have a standard poodle cross who is only happy when she's curled up on the couch with someone and the neighbor's cat. I can't say that either of them has particularly been immortalized in fiction as yet.FT: Which character within your latest book was the most fun to write and why?DA: In the last book of the Long Price Quartet, there's a character named Idaan who has become one of my favorites. She was the villain of an earlier book, and shows back up having spent thirty years growing up, having experiences and trials of her own, and when she appears again, she's both a different person and who she always was. One of the things that writing these books taught me about myself was that I don't want my bad guys defeated so much as understood and -- where possible -- forgiven.FT: How similar to your principle protagonist are you?DA: I can't tell. He and I certainly have some character traits in common, but that's true of me and my villain too. FT: What hobbies do you have and how do they influence your work?DA: I have a preschool-age daughter. My opportunity for hobbies is pretty slim these days. When I had free time, I was learning to play piano and draw. I'm terrible at both, which is part of the point. I suppose, being bloody-minded about it, biology is something of a hobby of mine.I have a degree in it, I still read magazines and books on the subjects I've studied, and I've never applied any of that knowledge in a professional setting. And that certainly has influenced how I see the world.FT: Where do you get your idea's from?DA: I've thought about that a lot. On the one hand, I don't know.Sometimes I can trace an idea back to some particular incident or accident or response to something that pissed me off. Other times, they just show up. I suspect that for the most part I get my ideas from other books and stories I've read, only they bounce off my perspective and experience and take on a spin of their own.FT: Do you ever encounter writers block and if so how do you overcome it?DA: I've had something like it in which I decide that whatever I'm doing at the moment is the worst piece of junk ever put to paper and will prove beyond a doubt that I'm a talentless fraud who would be better served answering phones on a tech support desk (which I actually did for several years). It turns out that just about every writer I know suffers the same. As hard as it is, I try to get around it by giving myself permission to do bad work. When I go back later, it's usually not half as bad as I thought, and when it is, there's I often know how to fix it.FT: Certain authors are renowned for writing at what many would call uncivilised times. When do you write and how do the others in your household feel about it?DA: My household is very supportive of me. Which is to say, my wife is. A four-year-old daughter is never supportive of anything but the decision to get more ice cream. When I was younger, I would write late at night, starting around 10pm and going until I was done. Now, I begin writing about half an hour after daycare starts and stop about as long before it ends.FT: Sometimes pieces of music seem to influence certain scenes within novels, do you have a soundtrack for your tale or is it a case of writing in silence with perhaps the odd musical break in-between scenes?DA: I tend to write in silence, but there are exceptions. I wrote a novel once with Cliff Martinez score to sex, lies, and videotape looped in the background. But I can't write to music with words. I start paying attention to them, and then I'm not at work any more.
FT: What misconceptions, if any, did you have about the writing and publishing field when you were first getting started?DA: The biggest misconception I had was exactly how much of being a writer means writing. I am capable of filling any number of days preparing my taxes, participating in online discussions, promoting my books, copy editing, reading galley proofs, corresponding with my agent and editor, and on and on and on without ever getting around to writing fiction. A friend of mine once spoke to a group of business professionals who were astounded to discover that writers don't have personal secretaries to take care of all those things. They don't.FT: If music be the food of love, what do you think writing is and please explain your answer?DA: If music be the food of love, than writing be the food of insight. An old teacher of mine once said that music sounds the way feelings feel, and I think that's true. Music -- like photographs -- gets a free pass around our conscious, evalutative mind. Words on paper have to push through much more brain. The way that music invites you to feel, words invite you to think, to agree, to disagree, to recognize whether a thing is true in your experience. It's what makes writing fiction tricky.Fiction's the art of saying things happened that didn't happen, any yet are in some sense true. FT: What can you tell us about the next novel?DA: It's an intentional riff on everything I think is cool. Tevis' Queen's Gambit, Reck-Malleczewen's Diary of a Man in Despair, Macbeth, Babylon 5, Firefly, anything by Alan Furst, Dunnet's House of Niccolo books, A Song of Ice and Fire, all whipped together into what I think makes them nifty. Plus, there's dragons. FT: What are the last five internet sites that you've visited?DA: yuki-onna.livejournal.com (She really didn't like Yellow Blue Tibia) facebook.com (Yes, everyone's lives are progressing apace) krugman.blogs.nytimes.com (Sometimes, I despair) xkcd.com (Always) yetistomper.blogspot.com (A friend of mine just made the "names to watch" list)FT: Did you ever take any writing classes or specific instructions to learn the craft? If so please let us know which ones.DA: I have taken several undergraduate creative writing courses from which I learned nothing. I have attended the Clarion West workshop in 1998, from which I learned quite a bit. I am a habitual attendee of Walter Jon Williams' Rio Hondo workshop in Taos, New Mexico, where I consistently get deeper and more nuanced insight into the craft of writing, and I was part of a critique group with Walter Jon Williams, S.M. Stirling, Melinda Snodgrass, Ian Tregillis, and (occasionally) George RR Martin (among others) which taught me how to write novels.FT: How did you get past the initial barriers of criticism and rejection?DA: I turned it into a game of postal ping-pong. I sent the story out, they sent it back, I sent it out, they sent it back. The point of the game wasn't to sell the story so much as to always have it in the mail.Redefining success as having something in the mail helped a lot. And then there was also the weeks-to-months long bouts of despair and depression after a particularly cruel rejection letter. (I'm looking at you, Weird Tales, circa 1992 . . .)FT: In your opinion, what are the best and worst aspects of writing for a living?DA: The best aspect is that I get to make money from doing something I would be doing anyway. I can work on my own time and my own schedule, and I'm doing things I genuinely love to do.The worst aspects are that I am also a professional gambler. The success or failure of a project is driven by a huge variety of variables over which I have no control, and too many failures in a row can have very serious economic consequences. I live in the US, and we have no public health care, so the stakes are often quite high.
BOOK BLURB:
In a remote mountain academy, the politically expendable younger sons of the Great Houses study for an extraordinary task. Most will fail, some will die, but the reward for the dedicated few is great: mastery of the andat, and the rank of Poet. Thanks to these men - part sorcerers, part scholars - the great city-states of the Khaiem enjoy wealth and power beyond measure, and the greatest of them all is Saraykeht: glittering jewel of the Summer Cities.
There are those in the world, however, who envy such wealth. There are great riches to be had in the Summer and Winter Cities, and only the threat of the andat unleashed holds the enemies of the Khaiem in check. Conflict is brewing in the world. Alliances will be broken and friends betrayed. The lowly will be raised up, the mighty will fall and innocents will be slaughtered. And two men, bound to each other by an act of kindness and an act of brutality, may be all that stands between the civilised world and war. War and something worse . . .
BOOK BLURB:
The poets and their magical andat have protected the cities of the Khaiem against their rivals in Galt for generations. Otah, Khai of the Winter City of Machi, has tried for years to prepare his people for a future in which the andat can no longer be safely harnessed. But his warnings have been ignored, and now it’s too late.
A ruthless, charismatic Galtic general believes he has found a way to strip the andat of their power. If he is wrong, Galt will be destroyed. If he is right, the Khaiem will fall. Only one thing is certain: conflict is inevitable, and Otah and his old friend and enemy the disgraced poet, Maati, must fight a desperate battle to protect their cities from slaughter.
These two men, bound together by shadow and betrayal, will bring the world to the edge of a cataclysm unlike anything either side had imagined. For if the cost of war is high, the price of peace may be unimaginable . . .
REVIEW:
There are some books that when you pick them up you get goose bumps from just the first couple of pages. This is one of those titles that not only gets your interest but grabs it, ties it up and refuses to let go no matter what the ransom is. Add to the mix in two volumes a complete four book series and you know that its serious value for money. Daniel really has exploded onto the writing scene with this offering and whilst they originally started way back in 2006 its had to wait until now to grab my attention. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out on future offerings from Daniel but don’t just keep quiet about this series, give it a go, shout the odds to all who’ll listen. You won’t be disappointed.
