Martha Wells, of All Systems Red fame, is putting out a new stand-alone book about witches, kings, and murder. Everything in that sentence excited me, and I could not wait to get my hands on this new story about an amnesia-riddled demon on a quest for truth. The book turned out to be very different…
In the back of my ARC of Untethered Sky, there was a short section from Fonda Lee about how she went to a con and got encouraged by authors there to try her hand at writing a novella. She said she had an idea for a short story about a girl who rode cool giant…
As I was reading The Warden by Daniel Ford, I couldn’t put my finger on what it reminded me of. The back of the book bills it as Twin Peaks but with wizards, but that wasn’t quite right. Eventually, after hours of immersing myself in its mixture of cute slice-of-life drama and horrifying war veteran…
If you have been hanging around The Quill to Live for a while you might know that we love Sebastian de Castell. Author of The Greatcoats and Spellslinger series, de Castell is a permanent fixture in our hidden gem recommendations. He has a swashbuckler charm that pervades all his stories with humor, drama, and emotion…
Continue reading ➞ The Malevolent Seven – Angels, Demons, And What Lies Between
Infinity Gate is the latest book by M.R. Carey of The Girl With All The Gifts and The Book of Koli fame. It is a story about infinite Earths, all separated by thin barriers of parallel realities, and the people who pass between them. It is a baton race of human suffering that explores the…
Just as I was getting tired of magical school stories, I found myself presented with possibly the best one yet. Some years it is difficult to know which books will be in your top picks and other years you get standout paragons of excellence, like James Islington’s The Will of the Many. Islington already rates…
Continue reading ➞ The Will Of The Many – The Strength Of The Few
For the last few years, I have spent a significant amount of my free time playing Dungeons and Dragons as a game master. As it eats into my writing and reading time significantly (though I still highly recommend it) I was searching for a way to turn my D&D experiences into content. Thus the idea…
Today I am diving into the increasingly popular The Sword of Kaigen: A Theonite War Story by M.L. Wang. This self-published, Japanese culture-inspired novel has been making larger and larger waves in the fantasy genre over the past few years and is held in quite high regard. I finally managed to find a moment to…
What an absolute Pandora’s Box of despair today’s book is. Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh, is a stand-alone science fiction thriller about a cell of radical Earth terrorists looking to avenge the death of the blue marble by taking out some alien civilians. It is a strange and brilliant reversal of many classic first-contact…
Continue reading ➞ Some Desperate Glory – Infinite Last Stands
I was looking around on the internet last year for a list of fantasy recommendations from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s and found the results wanting. Since I have a number of pocket recommendations from those decades already I decided that this year I would make a guide myself. But first, I wanted to…
Continue reading ➞ The Belgariad – Pawns, Prophecy, and Polgara
