Every year the Quill to Live sit down in December to plan our collective reading schedule for the next year. It’s a long process, and it heavily involves combing through release dates of series we are following and, more importantly, digging into the hundreds of upcoming and highly anticipated book lists made by publishers, authors, other reviewers, and general fantasy and sci-fi fans. Through this process, we give our yearly reading schedules a little bit of structure – but one of the other benefits is picking out potential dark horses to keep an eye on. If you are unfamiliar with the term, a dark horse is a competitor who comes out of nowhere against all odds to win. In our case, we use it to refer to books that almost no one has heard of that we want to check out or keep an eye on. Sometimes this results in us reading terrible books that we might or might not review depending on how productive we feel our criticism will be. However, other times it results in us being able to champion new and upcoming authors who deserve more recognition.
Recently, we have been getting a lot of requests to describe the 2019 books we are excited about, in particular, the dark horses we have our eyes on. Thus, going forward we will put out a list of our annual dark horses in case you want to keep an eye on them as well. We will put this list out earlier next year, and while we will do our best to review every book on this list, the inclusion of a book does not guarantee we will be able to get to and review it. Here are the dark horses The Quill to Live is watching in 2019 (in no particular order). Goodreads links are on the pictures:
- For The Killing Of Kings, by Howard Andrew Jones: As I mentioned we are a bit late on this list this year, so we have actually already reviewed this one. We loved it, check it out!
- Sky Without Stars, by Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell
- The Luminous Dead, by Caitlin Starling
- The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless
- Perihelion Summer, by Greg Egan
- The Priory Of The Orange Tree, by Samantha Shannon
- Titanshade, by Dan Stout
- Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
- Gods Of Jade And Shadow, by Silva Moreno-Garcia
- Famous Men Who Never Lived, by K Chess
- Sixteen Ways To Defend A Walled City, by K. J. Parker
- This Is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
5 thoughts on “The Dark Horse Initiative – 2019”