My most anticipated books of 2021!
I thought what better way to celebrate the death of the awful 2020 but by celebrating the art that makes it all a bit more bearable?
So here are some of my most anticipated reads of 2021, in no particular order, if you’re wondering what this author likes to read in her spare time!
I can’t wait to get my teeth into all of them!
Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo
The wolves are circling and a young king will face his greatest challenge in the explosive finale of the instant #1 New York Times-bestselling King of Scars Duology.
Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulleey
Debut author Angeline Boulley crafts a groundbreaking YA thriller about a Native teen who must root out the corruption in her community, for readers of Angie Thomas and Tommy Orange.
As a biracial, unenrolled tribal member and the product of a scandal, eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine has never quite fit in, both in her hometown and on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. Daunis dreams of studying medicine, but when her family is struck by tragedy, she puts her future on hold to care for her fragile mother.
Now, Daunis must learn what it means to be a strong Anishinaabe kwe (Ojibwe woman) and how far she’ll go to protect her community, even if it tears apart the only world she’s ever known
The Witch’s Heart by Genevieve Gornichec
Angrboda’s story begins where most witches’ tales end: with a burning. A punishment from Odin for refusing to provide him with knowledge of the future, the fire leaves Angrboda injured and powerless, and she flees into the farthest reaches of a remote forest. There she is found by a man who reveals himself to be Loki, and her initial distrust of him transforms into a deep and abiding love.
Their union produces three unusual children, each with a secret destiny, who Angrboda is keen to raise at the edge of the world, safely hidden from Odin’s all-seeing eye. But as Angrboda slowly recovers her prophetic powers, she learns that her blissful life—and possibly all of existence—is in danger.
With help from the fierce huntress Skadi, with whom she shares a growing bond, Angrboda must choose whether she’ll accept the fate that she’s foreseen for her beloved family…or rise to remake their future. From the most ancient of tales this novel forges a story of love, loss, and hope for the modern age.
Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker
How close would you hold those you love, when the end comes?
In a society where self-preservation is as much an art as a science, Norah and Arthur are learning how to co-exist in their new little world. Though they hardly know each other, everything seems to be going perfectly – from the home they’re building together to the ring on Norah’s finger. But the earth is becoming increasingly hostile to live in. Fortunately, Easton Grove is here for that in the form of a perfect little bundle to take home and harvest. You can live for as long as you keep it – or her – close.
The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri
Author of Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne, beginning a new trilogy set in a world inspired by the history and epics of India, in which a captive princess and a maidservant in possession of forbidden magic become unlikely allies on a dark journey to save their empire from the princess’s traitor brother.
Sistersong by Lucy Holland
King Cador’s children inherit a land abandoned by the Romans, torn by warring tribes. Riva can cure others, but can’t heal her own scars. Keyne battles to be seen as the king’s son, although born a daughter. And Sinne dreams of love, longing for adventure.
All three fear a life of confinement within the walls of the hold, their people’s last bastion of strength against the invading Saxons. However, change comes on the day ash falls from the sky – bringing Myrdhin, meddler and magician. The siblings discover the power that lies within them and the land. But fate also brings Tristan, a warrior whose secrets will tear them apart.
Riva, Keyne and Sinne become entangled in a web of treachery and heartbreak, and must fight to forge their own paths. It’s a story that will shape the destiny of Britain.
The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna
Sixteen-year-old Deka lives in fear and anticipation of the blood ceremony that will determine whether she will become a member of her village. Already different from everyone else because of her unnatural intuition, Deka prays for red blood so she can finally feel like she belongs.
But on the day of the ceremony, her blood runs gold, the color of impurity–and Deka knows she will face a consequence worse than death.
Then a mysterious woman comes to her with a choice: stay in the village and submit to her fate, or leave to fight for the emperor in an army of girls just like her. They are called alaki–near-immortals with rare gifts. And they are the only ones who can stop the empire’s greatest threat.
Knowing the dangers that lie ahead yet yearning for acceptance, Deka decides to leave the only life she’s ever known. But as she journeys to the capital to train for the biggest battle of her life, she will discover that the great walled city holds many surprises. Nothing and no one are quite what they seem to be–not even Deka herself.
This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron
Briseis has a gift: she can grow plants from tiny seeds to rich blooms with a single touch.
When Briseis’s aunt dies and wills her a dilapidated estate in rural New York, Bri and her parents decide to leave Brooklyn behind for the summer. Hopefully there, surrounded by plants and flowers, Bri will finally learn to control her gift.
When strangers begin to arrive on their doorstep, asking for tinctures and elixirs, Bri learns she has a surprising talent for creating them. One of the visitors is Marie, a mysterious young woman who Bri befriends, only to find that Marie is keeping dark secrets about the history of the estate and its surrounding community.
Up against a centuries-old curse and the deadliest plant on earth, Bri must harness her gift to protect herself and her family.
Witches Steeped In Gold by Ciannon Smart
Iraya Adair has spent her life in a cell. Heir of an overthrown and magically-gifted dynasty, she was exiled from her home on the island nation of Aiyca when she was just a child. But every day brings her closer to freedom – and vengeance.
Jazmyne Cariot grew up dressed in gold, with stolen magic at her fingertips. Daughter of the self-crowned doyenne, her existence is a threat to her mother’s rule. But unlike her sister, Jazmyne has no intention of dying to strengthen her mother’s power.
Sworn enemies, the two witches enter a deadly alliance to take down the woman who threatens both their worlds.
But revenge is a bloody pursuit, and nothing is certain – except the lengths Iraya and Jazmyne will go to win this game.
Two witches. One motive. And a very untrustworthy alliance.
The Betrayals by Bridget Collins
In an exclusive institution tucked away in the mountains the best and brightest study an arcane and mysterious game, as they have for centuries. But times are changing, and traditions being overturned – the truth will come out…
Lore by Alexandra Bracken
Every seven years, the Agon begins. As punishment for a past rebellion, nine Greek gods are forced to walk the earth as mortals, hunted by the descendants of ancient bloodlines, all eager to kill a god and seize their divine power and immortality.
Long ago, Lore Perseous fled that brutal world in the wake of her family’s sadistic murder by a rival line, turning her back on the hunt’s promises of eternal glory. For years she’s pushed away any thought of revenge against the man–now a god–responsible for their deaths.
Yet as the next hunt dawns over New York City, two participants seek out her help: Castor, a childhood friend of Lore believed long dead, and a gravely wounded Athena, among the last of the original gods.
A Psalm of Storm and Silence by Roseanne A. Brown
The highly anticipated second—and final—book in the immersive fantasy duology.
Karina lost everything after a violent coup left her without her kingdom or her throne. Now the most wanted person in Sonande, her only hope of reclaiming what is rightfully hers lies in a divine power hidden in the long-lost city of her ancestors.
Meanwhile, the resurrection of Karina’s sister has spiraled the world into chaos, with disaster after disaster threatening the hard-won peace Malik has found as Farid’s apprentice. When they discover that Karina herself is the key to restoring balance, Malik must use his magic to lure her back to their side. But how do you regain the trust of someone you once tried to kill?
As the fabric holding Sonande together begins to tear, Malik and Karina once again find themselves torn between their duties and their desires. And when the fate of everything hangs on a single, horrifying choice, they each must decide what they value most—a power that could transform the world, or a love that could transform their lives.
She Who Became The Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan
She’ll change the world to survive her fate . . .In Mongol-occupied imperial China, a peasant girl refuses her fate of an early death. Stealing her dead brother’s identity to survive, she rises from monk to soldier, then to rebel commander. Zhu’s pursuing the destiny her brother somehow failed to attain: greatness. ..
THE SECOND BELL named one of SFF180’s 31 most anticipated 2021 Fantasy novels!
A friend sent me a link to this yesterday!
My debut, The Second Bell, coming out in March 2021 from Angry Robot, has been listed as one of SFF180’s 31 most anticipated Fantasy novels of 2021!
I’m so incredibly chuffed and grateful to be listed alongside Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne (whose books, Empire of Sand, and Realm of Ash, inspired by the Mughal Empire, I absolutely LOVED), as well as some really exciting debuts, The Witch’s Heart by Genevieve Gornichec (a Norse retelling about the wife of Loki), and Son of the Storm by Suyi Davies Okungbowa, the first volume of a new fantasy trilogy inspired by the pre-colonial empires of West Africa!
There are many more amazing books on that list, so I link the video below, so you guys can have a look!
COVER REVEAL for THE SECOND BELL
The cover for my book baby is finally out!
It’s a beauty, I know! The team at Angry Robot had a real vision for the cover, and they’ve all been so gracious and patient with my many comments and suggestions and this is the final version, done by their very talented designer, Glen Wilkins! I’m a very happy, very grateful author.
Check out the Tor article and an interview with me here.
The Second Bell comes out March 2021!
Salka has to survive in a world which thinks her a monster. She seeks to explore the possibilities of her striga heart even as her mother is willing to sacrifice all to stop her!
BOOK DEAL NEWS!
Announcement time!
I’m beyond excited to finally be able to say it: my book will be a real thing. A real papery thing! With a pretty, pretty cover, a fabulous editor and a wonderful marketing team behind it and a lot of other things commonly associated with published novels!
The fabulous Eleanor Teasdale from Angry Robot Books has acquired my Adult Slavic Mythology-inspired fantasy novel, The Second Bell, and it’s due to come out Spring 2021.
You can read The Bookseller announcement here.
It’s a story of a young striga woman, Salka, who grows up in a world which believes her to be a monster. She struggles to harness the power of her second heart even as her mother is willing to sacrifice everything to stop her.
Here’s something nice my editor, Eleanor Teasdale, said about The Second Bell: “When I first heard the pitch for the book, I was worried it was too good to be true. Then it arrived in my inbox and blew me away with its magic. It’s a story with power, heart and the joy to be found from looking within yourself.”
I can’t wait to share this book with you all!
Agent Representation Announcement!
Super excited to announce I have signed with John Baker from the well-regarded Bell Lomax Moreton Agency!
John found my Twitter pitch during last September’s PitMad event on Twitter (SO worth participating if you’re seeking representation).
Having someone so tremendously enthusiastic and knowledgeable in my corner makes all the difference.
It’s tremendously important to have an agent who shares your vision not just for the one book but for your writing career as a whole, and I was so impressed by how well prepared and full of ideas John was when we met for an interview/three hour long coffee.
I look forward to a long and fruitful partnership!
The Joy and Wonder of Beta Readers
I’m not impatient, not at all.
I’m just sitting here quietly, as my marvelous beta readers are doing their thing. For the uninitiated, beta readers are all of those wonderful people in your life (or on the web, depending on your preference), who are the first people to read through your novel (who are not you, or some version of you).
Those are the people who will ruthlessly point out anything that simply doesn’t work, that jars, that bores them. They are also, hopefully, the people who will tell you exactly why they love your manuscript.
I’m lucky enough to have a few people in my life, who I know will not sugarcoat it, and will tell me exactly where I might have lost the plot a little bit, or where the stakes are unclear. I have the good fortune of having two local writer-friends, each extremely talented in their own right, and each with completely different expectations/interests. In beta-reading context this works brilliantly for me, as each one of them will focus on a different aspect of my novel, and come up with a different way in which I can improve it.
One of my writer-pals is extremely plot-focused, expecting each page to hook her and bind her to my characters, so that she simply can’t put the book down. Because otherwise, she tells me, she certainly will. So no pressure there. Her no-nonsense approach keeps me on my toes.
My other writer friend writes what one would probably categorize as literary fiction, and she looks for the flow of the language, the mood and the tone. She’s the one to let me know where a sentence needs to be more staccato, and where the tone of the sentence lets me down. I listen to her note-full voice messages with fascination, like I’m invited to take a gander inside her head.
If you write, I highly recommend asking as wide a range of beta readers as possible to look through your manuscript, as they will all find different things which interest and confuse them. It’s the first taste of true readership, and you should savour it, for the opportunity it gives you to improve your work in ways which simply wouldn’t be possible on your own.
Editing the New Thing and the Sparkly Ideas
I’m waiting for my agent to finish reading through my big picture edits (see the last post) of my adult fantasy novel, let’s call it novel X.
What does one do in this time, except drive themselves mad with anxiety? Well, if you’re me, you have a very long list of to-do jobs. When I was querying and then waiting for my agent’s edit points, I completed my YA fantasy novel, set in the world of Slavic sea myths. And now is the perfect time to do the edits on that draft. The. Perfect. Time. So what do I do? I come up with a shiny Middle Grade novel idea that keeps me up at night and sends me to the reference texts for research.
I bat it away and plow away at the YA novel, which I am enjoying, I truly am. And it keeps coming back. Just one sentence, just the opening line… it whispers in my ear. And twenty minutes later I find I wrote the opening scene.
“No!” I shout and go back to my edits. To the edits of that really hard scene in the middle, where the dialogue just didn’t feel quite right and I need to change that one word but I don’t know to what…
Still, the new shiny idea beckons, as I grapple with the muddle of a scene.
Just the rough outline. It’s in your head anyway. You might as well write it down before you forget. Because you will forget. Remember that short story you dreamt up? The one you don’t remember, because you didn’t write it down?
“It was a stupid idea. All I could remember was a live sea being carved up by aliens.”
Perhaps. But you remembered how it feeeelt…
And so I obligingly tap-tappity-tap away on my keyboard.
But I’m at my favourite café today, sipping a latte and feeling strong! So no more distractions, no more diversions, no more interruptions!
But you have this dialogue in your head already… Maybe you can just…
SHUT UP!
Big Picture Edits
I have just completed the “Big Picture Edits” on my last manuscript. My agent, has gone over my book with a fine-tooth comb and came up with an INCREDIBLY LONG list of things that don’t work/could work better/need expanding.
You know all those little lazy bit of writing you think will hide in the awesomeness of your plotting? They will be found out. All the slightly awkward bits of dialogue that you thought “oh, it will be fine“. It will jar on your reader as much as it did on you. And then there were all the little things I did not notice, for reasons varying from “I just love this character and will shoe-horn this conversation in, so it can shine its light upon all” to “well, I meant it to come across like this, so surely since it was in my head, you can see it too, in spite of me not having written a word for it to become apparent?”
All in all, the list of edits was about 100 bullet-points, some of which required barely a new paragraph, some which forced me to rewrite three chapters and add two brand-new ones.
And it was painful, I won’t lie. It took me over two months and extra 20k words But the book ended up being so much stronger as a result. I actually feel like it says what I need it to say now, and the characters are more consistent, more solid.
That’s the beauty of the editorial process, a collaborative one. It’s not meant to be easy.
So suck it up and enjoy the ride.
Books by Women
I have recently come across a Twitter thread by the wonderful Joanne Harris where she quoted a review of her own book, Chocolat, where the author of the review chose to describe it as a tale of a a single mother who liked chocolate. I kid you not.
That prompted an extensive conversation and wide-spread mockery of course, focused around how women’s books are often misrepresented simply because they are written by women. There’s a reason why Robin Hobb and JK Rowling chose to stay gender-neutral on the covers. Books by women are perceived differently. Let’s start with the sad fact that a lot of men will glance over a book written by a woman, assuming straight off that its intended audience are women. Nobody makes a similar assumption about books written by men.
It made me think about all the wonderful, nuanced titles by female authors which have been overlooked or miscategorised because of their authors’ gender. If a book is written by a woman and it has a hint of romance in it, the entire thing can be conveniently dumped in a “romance genre”. If it portrays family relationships or female friendships, it can be chick-lit and nothing more.
But when a man writes about the exact same subject we often automatically bestow an assumption of gravitas onto the work.
Now I’m not trying to be overly critical of the romance genre at all. There are some wonderfully written books in that genre, just like everywhere else. But it is undeniable that most men will not touch anything that has been dumped into that category with a ten-foot pole.
My favourite book of all time, one which I reread once every year or two, is The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery. I would argue it’s a tremendously sensitive portrayal of loneliness and the habit-forming resignation to a life of social exclusion and anonymity. It shows the crippling fear of poverty, and female poverty especially, which has such power that it can stunt personal growth and thwart even the most modest of personal ambitions. It also describes the strength and determination required to break free, and the exhilaration which follows it.
But The Blue Castle is by no means a terribly famous or popular book. It’s seen as a romance and the subtlety and charm of it are stripped in the descriptions of it. You can buy it in paperback generally, with tacky, pastel covers usually reserved for Harlequin editions. The kind of covers which instantly signal “This is for women only”.
And all I want to ask is “why”? Not just why are women authors thus undervalued and misrepresented, but why are we depriving men of what could be, without a doubt, an oft wonderful reading experience.
Writing Scenes of Pain
Now my writing is filled with a whole lot of pain and hardship and difficulties. Misery writes itself, as we all know. But that could lead you to the entirely wrong assumption that I enjoy inflicting pain upon my characters. I do not. The scene I wrote today felt as upsetting to write as it was for my MC(well, close at least). The current WIP is a first person narrative, which adds another level of upset to the whole thing. As I type I channel the sensation of touch, smell and taste into the descriptions, because that’s what my character is experiencing. There is a sense of responsibility here. If you make your darlings suffer, you have to make it good. Suffering not written well feels trite and like a betrayal of this person you have created.
And, unlike in life, suffering has to serve a purpose. We’ve all sat through a badly written show or movie where the protagonist seems endlessly knocked about, but learns nothing, does nothing, and the viewer in the end gets the uncomfortable impression the authors of the protagonist’s suffering are either a)getting some unsavoury sort of satisfaction from the whole thing or b) they keep writing the same thing in the hope the next plotline will eventually reveal itself. Which, as we all know, is the first sign of madness.
But here’s the rub: striking that balance, where the suffering of the MC serves a purpose but not in a too obvious and realistic way is the hard bit. And each time I take from my MC something they love, or inflict physical pain on them, I hope I get it right.