City of Blades
A densely atmospheric and intrigue-filled fantasy novel, set in the same world as the author’s City of Stairs
A few months ago, General Turyin Mulaghesh was one of the most powerful people in all the Saypur empire.
Then, for reasons known to nobody but herself, Mulaghesh abruptly turned her back on a position most people could only dream of.
Now? Now she’s about to be shuffled off to one of those backwater postings where lame-duck senior officers like her are put out to pasture, left to count down the days before she draws her military pension and heads off into a long, lonely retirement.
At least, that’s the cover story.
The truth is that the general has been pressed into service one last time, dispatched to investigate a discovery only she’s qualified to make sense of, one with the potential to change the world — or destroy it.
The trouble is that this old soldier isn’t at all sure she’s still got what it takes to play the hero.
Readers also enjoyed
Robert Jackson Bennett
In the shifting terrain of modern fantasy, Robert Jackson Bennett stands out not for the worlds he builds, but for the questions he refuses to let go unanswered. His stories don’t just transport readers—they confront them. What if gods could die, and their corpses still held sway over history? What if magic were reduced to a language—a programming code etched into reality—and power came from those who knew how to rewrite the rules?
Born in 1984 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and raised in the outskirts of Houston, Bennett grew up roaming the in-between spaces—construction sites, empty fields, drainage ditches. Places where things were half-finished or half-forgotten. That sense of the liminal—the not-quite-here, not-quite-normal—echoes in everything he writes. He later studied English at the University of Texas at Austin, but it wasn’t academia that shaped his narrative instincts—it was curiosity, the kind that turns over every rock just to see what’s writhing beneath.
The Divine Cities
The Divine Cities consists of three books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
