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
It’s 2023 and we are finally getting another Craft novel by Max Gladstone. For those unfamiliar, The Craft Sequence is a confusingly laid out set of books set in a modern fantasy setting about corporate employees using magic to fight gods and horrors in a terrifyingly broken world. I feel comfortable saying the setting is…
The Empire of the Wolf, by Richard Swan, is certainly one of the more unique and original fantasy series hitting the shelves right now. I found myself reading the second installment, The Tyranny of Faith, recently and it continues to be a story that constantly defies my expectations. It is a series that walks you…
Today we have an interesting historical fantasy book by the name of The Magician’s Daughter, by H.G. Parry. Despite the back of the book describing a plot about the end times and the death of magic, this book had a closer feel to a slow-burn cozy read than a thriller. It focuses on a young…
Continue reading ➞ The Magician’s Daughter – Beautiful People With Nowhere To Go
