Port of Shadows falls between Book 1 and 2 in the series.
Years into a campaign against the rebels who have rallied behind the White Rose have left the Company jaded and the Lady seems to have taken particular interest in Croaker since his stay in the Tower hasn't exactly made his life easier.
The Limper is up to his old tricks and is doing everything within his power to separate Croaker and the Black Company from The Lady's favor.
Croaker finds his fate tied to a new Taken. One claiming to be something impossible but feels uncomfortably familiar. It's going to take all of Croaker's cunning to insure that the plans of The Lady and her "loyal" Taken don't destroy the company once and for all.
Read more: Port of Shadows - Glen Cook
Review: Paris Adrift by E.J. Swift
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
E.J. Swift's Paris Adrift was published by Solaris Books in February 2018.
Information about E.J. Swift:
E.J. Swift is the author of The Osiris Project, a speculative fiction trilogy published by Del Rey UK and Jabberwocky (US) that explores the geopolitical impacts of climate change. Book One, Osiris, is set in a future ocean metropolis, a failed utopia whose inhabitants believe they live on the last city on earth. The second book, Cataveiro, is set in South America, and expands the series to explore the world beyond Osiris. The series concludes with Tamaruq.
Her latest novel, Paris Adrift, a tale of bartenders, time travel and the City of Light, is published by Solaris.
Her short fiction has appeared in Interzone magazine and in anthologies from Salt Publishing, Jurassic London and NewCon Press. Her short story “Saga’s Children” (The Lowest Heaven, 2013, Jurassic) was shortlisted for a BSFA Award. You can read it online for free here. “The Spiders of Stockholm” (Irregularity, 2014, Jurassic) was longlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.
Click here to visit her official website.
Information about Paris Adrift:
The Time Machine meets Midnight In Paris
Paris Was Supposed to Save Hallie. Now... Well, Let's Just Say Paris Has Other Ideas.
There's a strange woman called The Chronometrist who will not leave her alone. Garbled warnings from bizarre creatures keep her up at night. And there's a time portal in the keg room of the bar where she works.
Soon, Hallie is tumbling through the turbulent past and future Paris, making friends, changing the world - and falling in love.
But with every trip, Hallie loses a little of herself, and every infinitesimal change she makes ripples through time, until the future she's trying to save suddenly looks nothing like what she hoped for...
REVIEW: PARIS ADRIFT BY E.J. SWIFT
Read more: Review: Paris Adrift by E.J. Swift
An interview with Robert Jackson Bennett
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Interviews
Risingshadow has had the honour of interviewing Robert Jackson Bennett about his new novel, Foundryside, which is the first novel in The Founders Trilogy.
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.
Click here to read a review about Foundryside.
AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT JACKSON BENNETT
Read more: An interview with Robert Jackson Bennett
Review: The Archimage's Fourth Daughter by Lyndon Hardy
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
Lyndon Hardy's The Archimage's Fourth Daughter was published in December 2017.
Information about Lyndon Hardy:
Lyndon Hardy (1941- ) Author, prankster, grandfather.
He became interested in fantasy while wandering through the fringes of fandom when he was at Caltech. In addition to reading and writing, he has sporadic bursts of enthusiasm for collecting stamps and playing cards. As of yet, he has not figured out a plot line for a stamp collector who saves the world.
He published three fantasy novels for Ballantine/Del Rey in the 1980’s. They are now available again.
While at CalTech, in 1961 he organized and led what has been called the best college prank ever pulled - The Rose Bowl Card Stunt Caper.
He lives with his wife, Joan, in Torrance, California. Together they have two daughters and four living grandchildren.
Lyndon Hardy was born in Los Angeles, and except for a few years spent in Texas while growing up, has lived in California all his life. He received a BS in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1962 and a PhD in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1966. For 30 years he worked at TRW helping to build ground station software for satellites. After retiring from aerospace, he cofounded a software consulting firm, Alodar Systems, specializing in business processes, ERP solutions, and application integration. In 2016, he retired the company and began a new full time career of writing. Time will tell if he still has any gas left in the tank.
Click here to visit his official website.
Information about The Archimage's Fourth Daughter:
Alodar placed his hands on Briana’s shoulders, paused for a moment more, and then said softly, “The answer is no.”
“You can’t do that!” Briana yelled back. “Even the Archimage has limits to his power. You admitted as much yourself. You cannot order me around like some serf of an Arcadian lord.”
“I do not order you to stay because I am the Archimage,” Alodar said. “I do so because I am your father.”
Briana felt the anger well within her like a brush fire suddenly out of control. She clinched her teeth so as not to say more. The library page had a key to this council chamber, she thought fiercely. It might take more than a single kiss to get it, but that is what she would have to do.
Fourth book in the Magic by the Numbers series. A stand alone novel that does not require any of the preceding volumes need to read first.
REVIEW OF THE ARCHIMAGE'S FOURTH DAUGHTER BY LYNDON HARDY
Read more: Review: The Archimage's Fourth Daughter by Lyndon Hardy
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
Read more: Review: Salty Kiss Island: Fantastika Romantique by Rhys Hughes
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
Read more: Review: Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett