While reading and writing for The Quill is one of my passions, I also have two young daughters who are the joy of my life. Each week, we go to the library and pick out 5-10 new picture books from their incredible selection and make our way through them (purchasing those that we find outstanding).…
Continue reading ➞ QTL – Picture Book Recommendations Vol. 1
You might think from today's title that we have put together a composite list of our top books by site favorite author Adrian Tchaikovsky, which is a great idea for a post we should do. However, today I am reviewing a new short story collection from Subterranean Press, all by the weird and magical author…
Continue reading ➞ The Best Of Adrian Tchaikovsky – Fantastical, Scientific, And Weird
Stepping out of my comfort zone this week and decided to check out a promising new romantasy book that caught my eye. The Trident And The Pearl, by Sarah K.L. Wilson, is essentially a slow-burning romance about the leader of a nation falling in love with Poseidon. I always felt the god of the seas…
Continue reading ➞ The Trident And The Pearl – Rock The Boat
As we leave all the wonder books of 2025 behind us, the Quill to Live team has one more thing we actually want to talk about: novellas. Due to the extremely high number of novels that we tried to review in 2025, we didn’t have a lot of space to review some of the amazing…
Birth of a Dynasty, by Chinaza Bado, is something a little bit old and a little bit new. It has the bones of many modern-era epic fantasy hits, and it's dialed in to a lot of the strongest tropes that make this genre popular. While it isn’t reinventing the wheel, it is also an African-inspired…
Continue reading ➞ Birth Of A Dynasty – Noble On Noble Action
The Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman is hotly contested among QTL reviewers. Cole pretty vocally did not like book one, as can be seen by his review here. I was a little more middle of the road in my thoughts on book one and decided to stick with it to see if it…
Continue reading ➞ This Inevitable Ruin – Chekhov’s Artillery Strike
The Black Company is an all-time favorite series of the QTL team, and I would argue it’s probably the single most foundational story in how we came to be a group reviewing books. So, it’s not an understatement to say that there was a disproportionate amount of scrutiny being lobbed toward a brand new Black…
A sleeper hit drifting out of the ether, Slow Gods by Claire North was phenomenal (and made our best of 2025 list). I had never read North before, which is somewhat surprising given her enormous body of work under multiple names. I believe she is mostly known for her historically inspired fantasy, which is why…
Fresh off our best of the year list, let's talk a bit more about Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shroud. A standalone survival horror science fiction story from the master biomancer himself, this book did not disappoint on any front. It’s all about learning to perceive reality in new and interesting ways. Also, it’s anti-capitalist, spooky as all…
Ten years! Welcome to the tenth anniversary of The Quill to Live's best books of the year list! 2025 has been a banger year for science fiction, fantasy, and horror. One of the strongest years of the decade, 2025 was filled with standout books in multiple genres. There were actually so many interesting releases, sequels,…
