I love this book because it’s a world where bands of monster-fighting mercenaries are treated like rock stars, and for good reason: because they’re awesome as hell!
It has kickass characters like Ganelon, whose bandmates are simply the last four people he’d kill, and who’s fine so long as he’s still holding his beer.
If you’re looking for a book that has epic fights with the world’s shortest, most stubborn Minotaur or a book with characters who like to pray to whichever god is responsible for killing random people with the corpses of chimeras, then this is the book for you!
'An outstanding debut which will make you laugh and cry and hold your breath. This is a book that has it all' - K. J. Parker Clay Cooper and his band were once the best of the best - the meanest, dirtiest, most feared and admired crew of mercenaries this side of the Heartwyld. But their glory days are long past; the mercs have grown apart and grown old, fat, drunk - or a combination of the three. Then a former bandmate turns up at Clay's door with a plea for help: his daughter Rose is trapped in a city…
I love this book because I’ve always thought about giving up adventuring to open my own coffee shop in a city that’s never heard of it, and that’s exactly what Viv does, the orc who wants to be more than just the famous sword she hangs on her wall.
This book is like a cup of coffee in word form and can be best described by the book itself in the way it describes coffee: “It’s like drinking the feeling of being peaceful…”
High fantasy, low stakes - with a double-shot of coffee.
After decades of adventuring, Viv the orc barbarian is finally hanging up her sword for good. Now she sets her sights on a new dream - for she plans to open the first coffee shop in the city of Thune. Even though no one there knows what coffee actually is.
If Viv wants to put the past behind her, she can't go it alone. And help might arrive from unexpected quarters. Yet old rivals and new stand in the way of success. And Thune's shady underbelly could make it all…
I love this book because it’s about a library the size of a city, built within a mountain, withstanding war and time and world-ending events, and who in their right mind would not want to be trapped in a wonderful place like that?
I love the book’s random depth, like how the facts in memory may remain intact, but the emotion of them dry like ink and cease to gleam. Or about how we all sometimes realize that nothing matters, that we’re all just ticking clocks, trying to avoid pain until our time runs out, but purpose, however briefly, can break us free from that haunting knowledge.
All books, no matter their binding, will fall to dust. The stories they carry may last longer. They might outlive the paper, the library, even the language in which they were first written.
The greatest story can reach the stars . . .
This is the start of an incredible new journey from the internationally bestselling author of Prince of Thorns, in which, though the pen may be mightier than the sword, blood will be spilled and cities burned...
Evar has lived his whole life trapped within a vast library, older than empires and larger than cities.
North of
the Five Cities, where Memory Bladed bastards rule an isolated land, and south
of the Varasur Kingdom, where mages spread civilization like a sickness, lies a
valley worse than both, where nobody ever goes, no one except for Whinter Shaw.
She’d
heard the stories how if you’re looking for unusual, then this was the valley
for you, but Whinter never said no to a job for being strange. All she had to
do was find one girl in a valley of fifty towns, towns filled with teenage
assassins and bang-happy Brimsticks, with mad mayors and their Breakers, with
stray dogs and savage children, with wild farm girls and the Hunters who love
them, and that’s all before things start to get weird.
