Just a confirmation that my post on Julie Czerneda’s latest Fantasy novel, The Gossamer Mage will be posting later today. I’ve scheduled it to align with Julie’s home time zone in Canada, so stay posted folks.

Hint: I think this one will be worth your checking in again laterz. 😉

Meanwhile, for all you Southern Hemisphere folk, Happy Monday. The lucky Northern Hemisphere-ites get to linger in Sunday a little longer. 🙂

Laterz, one and all, south and north.

The Wall of Night Series map; artist Peter Fitzpatrick

The A Geography of Haarth post series is traversing the full range of locales and places from The Wall of Night world of Haarth. Each locale is accompanied by a quote from the relevant books where the place occurs.

From January 25, 2013 to November 25, 2014, the series explored locations encountered in The Heir Of Night and The Gathering Of The Lost. Now the series has resumed to ensure the geography of Daughter Of Blood (The Wall Of Night Book Three) is included in our “grand tour”, epic fantasy style. 😀

The new series comprises updates of previous entries as well as the new listings. At present, we’re continuing to traverse the territory of “T.” 😉

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The Leas:  a meadow area on Emer’s nothern march and the site of a recent skirmish

“The skylark was singing again when they left The Leas. Or perhaps, thought Carick, it was another bird pouring its song into the morning, unperturbed by battle and death. Mist still feathered the meadow and it was hard to believe that barely an hour had passed since the sun rose. And harder still to accept that young men who had been alive and eager in the gray predawn…were now corpses trussed across a horse’s back. They were leaving horses behind as well, some slain in the battle and others put down afterward.”

~  from © The Gathering Of The Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two: Chapter 21 — The Old Road
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Close enough to count, she added silently. Watching Raven work, she found herself putting other pieces in his puzzle together: from the night march to The Leas, to the way he had not needed the armring’s light when he separated from her, cutting through the pitch- dark woods…

~ from © Daughter Of Blood, The Wall of Night Book Three: Chapter 36 — The Language of Blood

The Gossamer Mage by Julie Czerneda

First off, Julie Czerneda’s new fantasy novel The Gossamer Mage is due out on August 6 from DAW books, but I’ll be talking about it here next Monday, 29 July — because, dear readers, I was the recipient of an advance copy way back in February/March, and will finally be sharing What I Thought as part of Julie’s launch razzmatazz.

I’ll tell you right now that I liked it A LOT, but you’ll have to come back next week to find out why. And just btw, isn’t that cover fabulous?! 🙂

To check out my thoughts on other, recent publications by Julie Czerneda, click on:

What I’m Reading: Search Image (Web Shifters’ Library #1)

What I’m Reading: The Only Thing To Fear

Where We Land by Tim Jones

Secondly, another friend-in-writing, Tim Jones, launched his latest work, the novella Where We Land, on July 16. It’s a climate change, near-future dystopia set in New Zealand, and published by The Cuba Press as part of a novella series. I didn’t have the opportunity to preread this one but I have preordered. 😉

Tim writes poetry as well as prose, and I’ve featured his work here several times in the life of the blog. 🙂

The Sea

Angela Carter

The Stars, Natasha

Thinning

Fun With Friends On SF Signal: Tim Jones

‘Men Briefly Explained’ — Tim Jones

The Heir Of Night Guest Author Interview Series — Tim Jones

The First Artist On Mars

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The About The Characters post series focuses on the minor characters in The Wall Of Night series, in large part because:

“I think it’s the presence of the smaller characters that “makes” a story, creating texture around the main points of view.”

~ from my Legend Award Finalist's Interview, 2013

Initially, the series focused exclusively on characters from The Heir of Night, but now I’m continuing on with minor characters from both The Gathering Of The Lost and Daughter of Blood simultaneously — in alphabetical order, of course!

(The quotes, together with the covers, indicate the books in which the character appears.)

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Herun: a tracker on the Northern March of Emer, in the Southern Realms of Haarth

Lord Falk, standing just inside the chapel door, stopped his captain with a gesture. Erron and Manan were waiting at the far end of the nave, by the desecrated altar, while the tracker, Herun, knelt to one side of the corpse. Carick tried not to look at the body too closely, or the stake and the blood splashed everywhere. Pushing aside the smell was harder, but he swallowed back another lurch of nausea and made himself focus…

~  from © The Gathering Of The Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two: Chapter 15 — The Chapel of Serrut

Every now and then I go on a ‘book browse and buy binge’, i.e. I go into a bookshop, browse all the sections, and choose an array of books in different genres, usually based solely on the interest sparked (in sequential order) by cover art, back cover synopsis, and my perusal of the first few pages.

Milkman is not one of those books. BUT it immediately predates such an expedition by being an airport book, purchased at the start of the journey that incorporated the ‘book browse and buy’ session, so I’m including it in the books I’ll be reporting back on, as a result of that process. And let’s face it, the Airport Read has to be another of the great book acquisition processes. (AR & BB&BB, just to go wild on acronyms.)

In terms of the book reports you can expect, last week’s post on Frankie McMillan’s My Mother and the Hungarians was the first of the BB&BB grab-bag.

Principle No 1 with this process is that ideally all the books should come from different genres or classes of literature. So My Mother and the Hungarians is a collection of flash fiction on broadly contemporary realist topics, whereas Milkman is a novel and a blend of recent historical and contemporary realist fiction. It’s set in the 1970s period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland—half a century ago now—but still close enough to us to seem as much contemporary as historical.

Milkman is also 2018’s Man Booker Prize winner, although I must confess I completely missed that sticker on the book cover: a classic example of hiding in plain sight, or reader’s myopia! But I did think the back cover synopsis sounded really interesting—and I was not wrong about that. Milkman is a really interesting story. It’s also a really tough read in many ways and one that requires concentration at times, so not necessarily one for the beach holiday or late at night when you’re tired. Warning: This book requires your full attention. (I do not, by the way, say that like it’s a bad thing.)

So what is it about, beyond the Troubles? That in itself is a challenging question because the book is about many things: the transition of a young woman from adolescence to adulthood amid family and (extreme) societal pressures; relationships, including dealing (or not dealing) with sexual predation; community tensions; and the overarching pressure of the Troubles which informs and shapes every aspect of life. So it’s not a book where it’s easy to glibly say, “Well, it’s about xyz…”

If pressed, though, I would say that this book is about a society under pressure and how that pressure pervades and distorts every aspect of individual, family, and community life.

Milkman is told entirely in first person point-of-view, but you never (I’m pretty sure)  know the name of the protagonist or many of those about her. This works in the context of the story but it’s also part of the reason the reader has to pay attention, because being stream of consciousness, the focus of the narrator’s perspective slides about a bit.

One of the thing’s that struck me about the book as well, is that the lens on people and events is frequently humorous. But that’s not at all the same thing as being comic, and very often the humor is downright dark or has dark overtones. What it does show, though, is how humor—dark, savage, wry—can be an important part of mental and emotional survival.

And it was only as I typed the word “survival” that I realised that is, of course, a really important element of what this book is about: personal survival and maintaining the bonds of personal relationship and community in the face of the extreme conditions cited above.

I think Milkman is a terrific, though challenging, read and I really recommend it. If you’ve enjoyed books like Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News? or Life After Life, Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, or Nadine Gordimer’s No Time Like The Present, I believe you may enjoy it, too.

As I’ve already indicated above, I purchased my copy of this book, which is the mass market paperback edition, 348 pp, published by Faber & Faber in 2018.

The Wall of Night Series map; artist Peter Fitzpatrick

The A Geography of Haarth post series is traversing the full range of locales and places from The Wall of Night world of Haarth. Each locale is accompanied by a quote from the relevant books where the place occurs.

From January 25, 2013 to November 25, 2014, the series explored locations encountered in The Heir Of Night and The Gathering Of The Lost. Now the series has resumed to ensure the geography of Daughter Of Blood (The Wall Of Night Book Three) is included in our “grand tour”, epic fantasy style. 😀

The new series comprises updates of previous entries as well as the new listings. At present, we’re deep in the terrain of “T.” 😉

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Terebanth:  a city of the River
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“Tarathan of Ar and Jehane Mor, heralds of the Guild,” one of Nhairin’s stewards roared out, above the hubbub. “From Terebanth, on the Great River.” Silence crashed down as every face turned toward the man and woman who stepped through the door. The man had multiple braids of chestnut hair flowing below his shoulders, while the woman was fair, with a single plait twisted around her head like a crown. They were both of middle height and clad alike in gray, their long cloaks cast back. A badge pinned each cloak on the left shoulder and a dagger was sheathed at their belts. Both their faces were drawn and weary, their clothes mired from the road, but they walked steadily through the watching, silent hall until they stood before the Earl’s chair. There they stopped as one and bowed, first to the Earl and then, slightly lower, to the woman at his side.”

~ from © The Heir Of Night, The Wall of Night Book One: Chapter 2 — Heralds of the Guild

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“Spring came to the River in a flurry of blustering winds and driving rain that turned the local roads into quagmires and hurled the first fragile blossoms to the ground. Two heralds were blown out of the city of Terebanth with the weather and turned east toward Ij, following the great Main Road that had endured since the days of the Old Empire.”

~  from © The Gathering Of The Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two: Chapter 1 — The Road To Ij
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Asantir replaced the longsword on the stand, her expression reflective. “I acquired this pair when I journeyed into the River lands with Earl Tasarion, before he became Night’s Heir. I had taken cover from a spring downpour in a dark, narrow little shop in Terebanth.” She paused. “I learned later that the trader, Gray Taan, was famous. As soon as I entered, he said that he had something that might interest me.”

~ from © Daughter Of Blood, The Wall of Night Book Three: Chapter 28 — Field of Play

Recently, I’ve been talking about short fiction (just a little, here and here.) Also, June 22nd was NZ’s National Flash Fiction Day and one of NZ’s foremost exponents of the short fiction art, and flash fiction in particular, is undoubtedly Frankie McMillan.

So there seemed no better way to round off the short fiction posts than to tell you about Frankie’s collection, My Mother and the Hungarians. (Hungarians, for short. 😉 )

Just to get to the most important things first, I really enjoyed reading it. My Mother and the Hungarians is flash or very very short fiction, in many ways a Siamese twin to prose poetry. In this case, though, themes run through the collection, to the extent that it works together as a cohesive whole.

Frankie McMillan has a ‘voice’ that I’ve always found particularly distinctive. In the spirit of Emily Dickinson, she has a slantwise take on the world and people in it, a take that picks out the curious and downright strange, oddities and absurdities—to the extent that I always think of her work as subversive: not so much in a political sense but in terms of received wisdoms and traditional ways of looking at the world.

For me, Hungarians really worked in terms of its keen observation, humour, and pathos, as well as a sequence of connected short fictions. Clearly, I’m not alone in my appreciation either, since it was longlisted for the Ockham National Book Award in 2017.

If you like (very) short fiction and a slantwise look at the world, I recommend My Mother and the Hungarians. I know it’s still available in good book shops because I purchased my copy in Unity, Wellington. 🙂

Frankie MacMillan

I also note that an interview with Frankie appeared in the latest edition of Takahe magazine. The interviewer was Zoë Meager.

By way of the usual disclosure, yes, Frankie and I really are on first name terms. 😉 I also esteem her creative voice highly. Because of this, I have featured her work on my blog several times, so you might like to check out:

Out Of The Blue, 28-9-2010

My Father, The Oceanographer (17-01-2012)

Cathedral of the Poor (21-5-2013)

The house on Holloway Street (23-8-2016)

I also featured Frankie’s work on The Tuesday poem blog:

“Hourglass” and “at night my dead mother appears wanting soup” (17-3-2015)

UK/AU/NZ

The About The Characters post series focuses on the minor characters in The Wall Of Night series, in large part because:

“I think it’s the presence of the smaller characters that “makes” a story, creating texture around the main points of view.”

~ from my Legend Award Finalist's Interview, 2013

Initially, the series focused exclusively on characters from The Heir of Night, but now I’m continuing on with minor characters from both The Gathering Of The Lost and Daughter of Blood simultaneously — in alphabetical order, of course!

(The quotes, together with the covers, indicate the books in which the character appears.)

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USA

Hawk: of Barrowdun, an Emerian Hill chieftain

…“And those few who have survived report uncanny things.” Carick caught the flicker of something that could have been fear in Hawk’s fierce eyes. “They speak of creatures who are half man and half beast, demons whose shapes change and shift beneath the moon.”

“On every raid,” Hirn concluded harshly, “they have left something behind—a weapon of Barrowdun in the Hillholt camp, a token of Hillholt in the ruins of a Barrowdun farmstead. Someone, my lord, wants war in our Hills.”

“And on my March,” said Lord Falk softly.

~  from © The Gathering Of The Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two: Chapter 17 — Oak and Hill

Yep, you guessed it — it’s the 1st of the month and that means Supernatural Underground! For this year, it also means my Year of Romance in Fantasy Fiction (#YOR #RIFF) is rocking on, alternating between more recent books and titles of longer standing.

This month, I’m heading back to 1988 and shining the spotlight on Katharine Kerr’s Daggerspell, her inaugural Deverry novel. In particular, I’m highlighting Jill and Rhodry, candidates for “love at first sight”, as well  as “fated love” and a few more of the romance traditions. 😉

I love this book, so if you don’t already know it and Katharine Kerr’s writing, rock on over to Supernatural Underground and find out more.

Romance In Fantasy Fiction: Katharine Kerr’s “Daggerspell” and Love At First Meeting

Of course, it’s not really the first, although Jill and Rhodry don’t know it… 😉

Have fun!

The Wall of Night Series map; artist Peter Fitzpatrick

The A Geography of Haarth post series is traversing the full range of locales and places from The Wall of Night world of Haarth. Each locale is accompanied by a quote from the relevant books where the place occurs.

From January 25, 2013 to November 25, 2014, the series explored locations encountered in The Heir Of Night and The Gathering Of The Lost. Now the series has resumed to ensure the geography of Daughter Of Blood (The Wall Of Night Book Three) is included in our “grand tour”, epic fantasy style. 😉

The new series comprises updates of previous entries as well as the new listings.

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Tenneward Lodge: country house belonging to the lord of the Tenneward, in Emer
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Cicadas whirred and the poplar leaves rustled together although there was almost no breeze. Across the fields, Malian could see workers making their way home and towers of mellow stone rising above a low hill. She wondered what Lord Tenneward’s lodge would be like—and almost laughed out loud, a few minutes later, as the avenue ended in gates with stone lions, the entrance framing a house that looked larger than Normarch castle. The lodge was built of pale yellow stone, with tall windows and a creeper twining across its face. Stables and mews and kennels, all in the same yellow stone, were set on the far side of a wide graveled courtyard to the right of the house.

~  from © The Gathering Of The Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two: Chapter 30 — The Welcome Cup
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Her seeking became the windhover, gliding this way and that on the currents of the air and all the time looking, searching— until Malian saw it, a Winter Country cairn in the midst of the Gray Lands, with the Song of Haarth rising beneath it. The spark of life force before the cairn would be the hound, Falath. She had seen him in her vision outside Tenneward Lodge, keeping his lonely vigil by Rowan Birchmoon’s grave.

~from © Daughter Of Blood, The Wall of Night Book Three: Chapter 38 — Dawn Wind