Helllooo!

Hope you’re ok - it is freezing at the moment. Here is another advance look at books that have caught my eye and also some on the horizon to look out for = booktempting is for life not just for the weekend

Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard - Out 9/2 from Tor.com £9.99 paperback £2.06 Kindle eBook

Fire burns bright and has a long memory....

Quiet, thoughtful princess Thanh was sent away as a hostage to the powerful faraway country of Ephteria as a child. Now she's returned to her mother's imperial court, haunted not only by memories of her first romance, but by worrying magical echoes of a fire that devastated Ephteria's royal palace.

Thanh's new role as a diplomat places her once again in the path of her first love, the powerful and magnetic Eldris of Ephteria, who knows exactly what she wants: romance from Thanh and much more from Thanh's home. Eldris won't take no for an answer, on either front. But the fire that burned down one palace is tempting Thanh with the possibility of making her own dangerous decisions.

Can Thanh find the freedom to shape her country's fate--and her own?

An author who I love to read anything by delivers what sounds an amazing story described as Goblin Emperor meets Howls Moving Castle….did you need to hear anything more? Expect a review soon

These Lifeless Things by Premee Mohamed - Out Now from Rebellion £3.99 ebook via Publisher website

Eva is a survivor. She’s not sure what she survived, exactly, only that They invaded without warning, killed nearly all of humanity, and relentlessly attack everyone who’s left. All she can do to stay sane, in the blockaded city that’s no longer home, is keep a journal about her struggle.

Fifty years later, Eva’s words are found by Emerson, a young anthropologist sent to the ruins to study what happened. The discovery could shed light on the Invasion, turning the unyielding mystery of the short war into a story of hope and defiance.

I am so glad to see more publishers experiment with novellas they offer a really interesting story and Rebellion kick off their new series with what sounds a fascinating story of war, history and narrative. Intriguing and Mohamed has impressed me already.

Four Lost Cities - A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz out Now from WW Norton and Company - £12.94 kindle eBook

A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history—and figure out why people abandoned them.

In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today.

Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia.

Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.

Newitz is more well known to geeks for their work on io9 and as an SF author this time turns to non fiction exploring cities and as a history fan this sounds right up my street

Beyond the Latch and Lever edited by Susanna Skaland and Elle Blackwood - Out Now from Glimma Publishing £8.71 paperback £2.58 Kindle ebook

Doorways can be a bridge to another world, a portal to a bygone era, or a crossroads between two cultures—or two lives. Sometimes a doorway is a ledge between the racist past and a robotic future. A passageway leading to celestial spirits, or earthbound souls—or a crumbling castle adrift in time.

Doorways are the ferries that usher us through beginnings and endings, steering us into possibility and misfortune, alike. Some doors protect us and give us privacy, while others keep us isolated and confined. Some doors trap people inside their haunted minds.

In this book, you will find eleven doors. Eleven stories waiting to be opened. Each one a passageway into the unknown. 

Beyond the Latch and Lever is an anthology of speculative literary fiction with stories from emerging authors with ties to the Pacific Northwest.

I’ll be reviewing this book later this week but I am always a sucker for stores that explore doorways. Ever since I learnt about that one in the wardrobe. This collection sounds a good fit for me

The Archive of the Forgotten by A J Hackwith - Out 9/2 from Titan Books - £8.99 paperback £6.99 Kindle eBook

The Library of the Unwritten in Hell was saved from total devastation, but hundreds of potential books were destroyed. Former librarian Claire and Brevity the muse feel the loss of those stories, and are trying to adjust to their new roles within the Arcane Wing and Library, respectively. But when the remains of those books begin to leak a strange ink, Claire realizes that the Library has kept secrets from Hell and from its own librarians.

Claire and Brevity are immediately at odds in their approach to the ink, and the potential power that it represents has not gone unnoticed. When a representative from the Muses Corps arrives at the Library to advise Brevity, the angel Rami and the erstwhile Hero hunt for answers in other realms. The true nature of the ink could fundamentally alter the afterlife for good or ill, but it entirely depends on who is left to hold the pen.

One book that lockdown got in the way was the first novel in this series The Library of the Unwritten that features a library in Hell . Considering my reputation as a for some reason being a demonic force of booktempting I need to get to these - I sense a double bill of tempting soon…

The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna - out 9/2 from Usborne Publishing - £8.99 paperback £3.99 Kindle eBook

Sixteen-year-old Deka lives in Otera, a deeply patriarchal ancient kingdom, where a woman's worth is tied to her purity, and she must bleed to prove it. But when Deka bleeds gold - the colour of impurity, of a demon - she faces a consequence worse than death. She is saved by a mysterious woman who tells Deka of her true nature: she is an Alaki, a near-immortal with exceptional gifts. The stranger offers her a choice: fight for the Emperor, with others just like her, or be destroyed...

hearing very good things about this book so I am going in!

Witherward by Hannah Matthewson - Out 16/2 from Titan Books - £7.99 paperback £4.74 Kindle eBook

Welcome to the Witherward, and to a London that is not quite like our own. Here, it’s summertime in February, the Underground is a cavern of wonders and magic fills the streets. But this London is a city divided, split between six rival magical factions, each with their own extraordinary talents – and the alpha of the Changelings, Gedeon Ravenswood, has gone rogue, threatening the fragile accords that have held London together for decades.

Ilsa is a shapeshifting Changeling who has spent the first seventeen years of her life marooned in the wrong London, where real magic is reviled as the devil’s work. Abandoned at birth, she has scratched out a living first as a pickpocket and then as a stage magician’s assistant, dazzling audiences by secretly using her Changeling talents to perform impossible illusions. When she’s dragged through a portal into the Witherward, Ilsa finally feels like she belongs.

But her new home is on the brink of civil war, and Ilsa is pulled into the fray. Beset by enemies on all sides, surrounded by supposed Changeling allies wearing faces that may not be their own, Ilsa must use all the tricks up her sleeve simply to stay alive.

Alternate magical cities with secrets are one of my catnips and this really sounds unusual

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey - out 18/2 from Tor - £17.99 hardback £6.99 Kindle eBook

It was meant to be an evening to honour and celebrate Evelyn Caldwell's award-winning, career-making scientific research - but Evelyn has things on her mind.

Things like Nathan, her husband, who has left her for a younger, better, newer woman. A woman who is now pregnant - but shouldn't be - and is strikingly familiar. Too familiar to be a coincidence.

A woman who shouldn't exist.

An unsettling piece of dark SF. That is also one of my catnips!

Black Coast by Mike Brooks - Out 18/2 from Orbit Books - £9.99 paperback £4.99 Kindle eBook

WAR DRAGONS.
FEARSOME RAIDERS.
A DAEMONIC WARLORD ON THE RISE.

When the citizens of Black Keep see ships on the horizon, terror takes them because they know who is coming: for generations, the keep has been raided by the fearsome clanspeople of Tjakorsha. Saddling their war dragons, Black Keep's warriors rush to defend their home only to discover that the clanspeople have not come to pillage at all. Driven from their own land by a daemonic despot who prophesises the end of the world, the raiders come in search of a new home . . .

Meanwhile the wider continent of Narida is lurching toward war. Black Keep is about to be caught in the crossfire - if only its new mismatched society can survive.

A book many of us have been waiting for a while (thank you lockdown) - unique world, dragons and I was an early fan of Brook’s SF work so intrigued how fantasy will go

The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers - Out 18/2 from Hodder & Stoughton - £16.99 Hardback £10.99 Kindle eBook

When a freak technological failure halts traffic to and from the planet Gora, three strangers are thrown together unexpectedly, with seemingly nothing to do but wait.

Pei is a cargo runner at a personal crossroads, torn between her duty to her people, and her duty to herself.

Roveg is an exiled artist, with a deeply urgent, and longed for, family appointment to keep.

Speaker has never been far from her twin but now must endure the unendurable: separation.

Under the care of Ouloo, an enterprising alien, and Tupo, her occasionally helpful child, the trio are compelled to confront where they've been, where they might go, and what they might be to one another.

Together they will discover that even in the vastness of space, they're not alone.

The final Wayfarers book…speaks for itself innit?

Always on the lookout for more books so if you have any to tempt let me know!!