A devilish plot to assassinate the Queen, a Cold War enemy hell-bent on destroying the nation, incredible gadgets, a race against time around the world to stop the ultimate doomsday device…and Elizabethan England’s greatest spy!

Meet Will Swyfte – adventurer, swordsman, rake, swashbuckler, wit, scholar and the greatest of Walsingham’s new band of spies. His exploits against the forces of Philip of Spain have made him a national hero, lauded from Carlisle to Kent. Yet his associates can barely disguise their incredulity – what is the point of a spy whose face and name is known across Europe?

But Swyfte’s public image is a carefully-crafted façade to give the people of England something to believe in, and to allow them to sleep peacefully at night. It deflects attention from his real work – and the true reason why Walsingham’s spy network was established.

A Cold War seethes, and England remains under a state of threat. The forces of Faerie have been preying on humanity for millennia. Responsible for our myths and legends, of gods and fairies, dragons, griffins, devils, imps and every other supernatural menace that has haunted our dreams, this power in the darkness has seen humans as playthings to be tormented, hunted or eradicated.

But now England is fighting back!

I felt the story lacked context and setup, as though I were supposed to know already why Swyfte was so well known around England, how he was so resourceful and why he wasn’t the least bit surprised by the all magick that occurs over the course of the story.

Jemisin creates a very cool world and a very well-described landscape and characters, and it feels both epic and character-driven all at once. Since it’s the first of a trilogy, there’s even more pressure to get the look right because you have to carry it over 2 more books. We agonized a bit over the right illustrator, and decided on the dark and textural work of Cliff Nielsen. He did a fabulous job of depicting the city of Skye, and got a great rich dark tone set for the cover. We drove him a little crazy I think, poor guy, with color adjustments and revisions…and I hope he forgives us because I can’t wait to see what he does for the next two books.

Once I got the art back from Cliff, I must have gone through a hundred different fonts and layouts for the cover — there’s a lot of text that needs to be there, but of course, you don’t want it to look like there’s a lot of text on the cover, you want the art to be the star. But after a little hair-pulling and head-bonking-on-desk on my part, I think we nailed it.

“Yeine Darr is heir to the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. She is also an outcast. Until, that is, her mother dies under mysterious circumstances.

Summoned by her grandfather to the majestic city of Sky, Yeine finds herself thrust into a vicious power struggle for the throne. As she fights for her life, she comes ever closer to discovering the truth about her mother’s death and her family’s bloody history – as well as the unsettling truths within herself.

With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate are bound inseparably together, for both mortals and gods alike.”

Though maybe not the most original plot out there, the setting seems interesting and I’m always up for a good bout of political intrigue. Certainly looks like a novel I’ll be keeping an eye on.

Princess Mistaya Holiday hasn’t been fitting in too well at Carrington Women’s Preparatory. People don’t seem to appreciate her using her magic to settle matters in the human world. So when she summons a dragon to teach a lesson to the snotty school bully, she finds herself suspended. But Mistaya couldn’t care less – she wants nothing more than to continue her studies under Questor the court magician and Abernathy the court scribe. However, her father Ben Holiday, the King of Landover, has rather different plans in mind for her. He thinks he’ll teach her about perseverance and compromise by sending her to renovate Libiris, the long-abandoned royal library. How horribly dull. But before long, Mistaya will long for the boredom of cataloguing an unfeasible number of derelict books – for deep within the library there lies a secret so dangerous that it threatens the future of Landover itself …