A genre-defying page turner that fuses thriller and speculative fiction with dark fantasy in a hidden world in the heart of Cold War Europe.
Europe. 1963. And the true Cold War is fought on the borders of this world, at the edges of the light.
When the assassination of a traitor trading with the enemy goes terribly wrong, British Intelligence agent Christopher Winter must flee London. In a tense alliance with a lethal, mysterious woman named Karina Lazarov, he's caught in a quest for hidden knowledge from centuries before, an occult secret written in the language of fire. A secret that will give supremacy to the nation that possesses it.
Racing against the Russians, the chase takes them from the demon-haunted Hungarian border to treasure-laden tunnels beneath Berlin, from an impossible house in Vienna to a bomb-blasted ruin in Bavaria where something unholy waits, born of the power of white fire and black glass...
It's a world of treachery, blood and magic. A world at war in the dark.
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Review: Salty Kiss Island: Fantastika Romantique by Rhys Hughes
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
Rhys Hughes's Salty Kiss Island: Fantastika Romantique was published by Immanion Press in June 2017.
Information about Rhys Hughes:
Rhys Hughes was born in 1966. Tartarus Press published his first collection, Worming the Harpy, in 1995, and since that time he has published more than thirty other books. His fiction is generally fantastical and his output mainly consists of short stories, though he has published several novels. His work is frequently compared to that of Boris Vian, Flann O'Brien and R.A. Lafferty, but he cites his major influences as Italo Calvino and Donald Barthelme. His most recent books include the collections Bone Idle in the Charnel House (Hippocampus Press), Orpheus on the Underground (Tartarus Press) and Brutal Pantomimes (Egaeus Press). Fascinated by paradoxes, he incorporates them into his fiction as entertainingly as he can.
Click here to visit his official website.
Information about Salty Kiss Island: Fantastika Romantique:
A collection of surrealist romantic stories.
This anthology collects for the first time Rhys Hughes’ fantastical love stories.
What is a fantastical love story? It isn’t quite the same as an ordinary love story. The events that take place are stranger, more extreme, full of the passion of originality, invention and magic, as well as an intensification of emotional love. Also, the voice that tells them has rather a different tone to a conventional romantic narrator.
The stories in Salty Kiss Island are set in this world and others, spanning the spectrum of possible and impossible experiences, the uncharted territories of yearning, the depths and shoals of the heart, mind and soul. They are adventure yarns, whimsies and comedies, tragedies and paradoxes. They are melancholy, gleeful, philosophic or mystical. A love of language runs through them, parallel to the love that motivates their characters to feats of preposterous heroism, luminous lunacy and grandiose gesture. They include tales of minstrels and their catastrophic serenades, dreamers sinking into sequences of ever-deeper dreams, goddesses and mermaids, sailors and devils, messages in bottles that can think and speak but never be read, shadows with an independent life and voyagers of distant galaxies who are already at their destinations before they arrive.
REVIEW: SALTY KISS ISLAND: FANTASTIKA ROMANTIQUE BY RHYS HUGHES
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Review: Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
Robert Jackson Bennett's Foundryside will be published by Penguin Randomhouse (Crown) in August 2018.
Information about Robert Jackson Bennett:
Robert Jackson Bennett is a two-time award winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, an Edgar Award winner for Best Paperback Original, and is also the 2010 recipient of the Sydney J Bounds Award for Best Newcomer, and a Philip K Dick Award Citation of Excellence. City of Stairs was shortlisted for the Locus Award and the World Fantasy Award. City of Blades was a finalist for the 2015 World Fantasy, Locus, and British Fantasy Awards. His seventh novel, City of Miracles, is in stores now.
Robert lives in Austin with his wife and large sons.
Click here to visit his official website.
Information about Foundryside:
In a city that runs on industrialized magic, a secret war will be fought to overwrite reality itself - the first in a dazzling new fantasy series from City of Stairs author Robert Jackson Bennett.
Sancia Grado is a thief, and a damn good one. And her latest target, a heavily guarded warehouse on Tevanne’s docks, is nothing her unique abilities can’t handle.
But unbeknownst to her, Sancia’s been sent to steal an artifact of unimaginable power, an object that could revolutionize the magical technology known as scriving. The Merchant Houses who control this magic - the art of using coded commands to imbue everyday objects with sentience - have already used it to transform Tevanne into a vast, remorseless capitalist machine. But if they can unlock the artifact’s secrets, they will rewrite the world itself to suit their aims.
Now someone in those Houses wants Sancia dead, and the artifact for themselves. And in the city of Tevanne, there’s nobody with the power to stop them.
To have a chance at surviving - and at stopping the deadly transformation that’s under way - Sancia will have to marshal unlikely allies, learn to harness the artifact’s power for herself, and undergo her own transformation, one that will turn her into something she could never have imagined.
REVIEW: FOUNDRYSIDE BY ROBERT JACKSON BENNETT
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The War in the Dark Blog Tour with Nick Setchfield: Spotlight and Giveaway
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Others
Risingshadow has the honour of participating in The War in the Dark Blog Tour with Nick Setchfield by hosting a spotlight and a giveaway.
THE WAR IN THE DARK BLOG TOUR WITH NICK SETCHFIELD: SPOTLIGHT AND GIVEAWAY
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Review: Timekeepers by Dave Weaver
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
Dave Weaver's Timekeepers was published by Elsewhen Press in a digital edition in March 2018 and in paperback in May 2018.
Information about Dave Weaver:
Author Dave Weaver lives in St. Albans, near the ruins of the Roman town of Verulamium. He has long been fascinated by history and his writing has often explored the relationship between reality and the popularly imagined past which invariably borders on fantasy. His first published novel, Jacey’s Kingdom, explored Dark Ages Britain as it was being imagined by a history student who lay in a coma. His latest novel, Timekeepers, is a dark dystopia, more science fiction than fantasy. Combining time travel and alternate realities with both history and a disturbing future, Timekeepers follows in the footsteps of HG Wells’ (ironically timeless) classic The Time Machine.
Information about Timekeepers:
NEVER PICK UP AN OLD COIN
An outsider in his own time, Jack finds himself a stranger in the distant past, then a pawn in a dark, dystopian future where rebels struggle to overturn an ancient and ruthlessly oppressive empire.
Jack has an exceptional gift: a remarkable ability to absorb and memorise facts instantly and without effort.
A lonely teenager, he has had little control over his life, having to leave behind friends and everything familiar, in the move to a new town, a new school, a new start. Jack misses his old life. He knows that his immediate future will not be easy - his astonishing memory has not always helped win him friends - but he can never have anticipated the incredible events that are about to befall him.
Discovering what appears to be an ancient coin, Jack finds himself abruptly hurled back and then forward through time, by a technology and an intelligence beyond his control. Jack’s extraordinary memory, and his fascination with history, are to prove vital as he is thrown back across the centuries, to the early years of the Roman occupation of Britain, then forward to the heart of a vastly powerful totalitarian state.
In both past and future, manipulated by opposing factions, Jack’s life is under constant threat. He will need all his ability and courage to survive.
Whom can he trust?
Can he save those he cares for?
Will he ever return home?
REVIEW: TIMEKEEPERS BY DAVE WEAVER
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Review: The Mirror of Legends by Bernard Lazare
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
Bernard Lazare's The Mirror of Legends was published by Snuggly Books in August 2017.
Information about Bernard Lazare:
Bernard Lazare (1865-1903) was a French Jewish literary critic and journalist. Though mostly remembered today for his prominent role in the Dreyfus Affair and his book Antisemitism: Its History and Causes, he was also an important member of the Symbolist movement, and one of its purest and most extravagant exponents. He wrote drama and some poetry, but the core of his production consisted of an extensive sequence of short stories, or elaborated poems in prose, most of which he published in Symbolist periodicals between 1887 and 1893, and which he subsequently organized into three augmented collections. Although somewhat neglected today, for reasons that have nothing to do with their literary and philosophical merit, Lazare’s short stories are key documents of the Symbolist movement, and a remarkable illustration of the methods and preoccupations of the writers whose activity constituted its heyday.
Information about The Mirror of Legends:
Here available in English for the first time, in a splendid translation by Brian Stableford, The Mirror of Legends, one of the important collections of French Symbolist Bernard Lazare (1865-1903), offers a melange of stories based on Greek, mythological and Biblical sources. In prose coiling as effusively as the smoke from a swinging censer, the esoteric lore of centuries is paraded before the reader in this series of incantatory poem-like tales that form an eclectic myth-cycle of their own. A mixture of erudition, heretical speculation and heightened lyricism, The Mirror of Legends presents a unique artistic statement of metaphysics, aesthetics and ethics.
REVIEW: THE MIRROR OF LEGENDS BY BERNARD LAZARE
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