I am delighted to be taking part in the cover reveal of Laini Taylor's much anticipated book:
Strange the Dreamer
Due to be published on September 27th 2016, it will be the first book of a series of two.
If you are not familiar with Laini's work, she wrote the best selling trilogy Daughter of Smoke and Bone.
Without further ado, here are the UK (on the left) and US covers, side by side.
©Laini Taylor, STRANGE THE DREAMER, out September 2016 by Hodder & Stoughton
What do we know of Strange the Dreamer so far? Well we have been told that it is all about:
the aftermath of a war between gods and men
a mysterious city stripped of its name
a mythic hero with blood on his hands
a young librarian with a singular dream
a girl every bit as perilous as she is imperilled
alchemy and blood candy, nightmares and godspawn, moths and monsters, friendship and treachery, love and carnage.
Just to whet your appetite a little more, here's the Prologue:
On the second sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.
Her skin was blue, her blood was red.
She broke over an iron gate, crimping it on impact, and there she
hung, impossibly arched, graceful as a temple dancer swooning on a
lover’s arm. One slick finial anchored her in place. Its point,
protruding from her sternum, glittered like a brooch. She fluttered
briefly as her ghost shook loose, and then her hands relaxed, shedding
fistfuls of freshly picked torch ginger buds.
Later, they would say these had been hummingbird hearts and not blossoms at all.
They would say she hadn’t shed blood but wept it. That she was lewd,
tonguing her teeth at them, upside down and dying, that she vomited a
serpent that turned to smoke when it hit the ground. They would say a
flock of moths had come, frantic, and tried to lift her away.
That was true. Only that.
They hadn’t a prayer, though. The moths were no bigger than the
startled mouths of children, and even dozens together could only pluck
at the strands of her darkening hair until their wings sagged, sodden
with her blood. They were purled away with the blossoms as a grit-choked
gust came blasting down the street. The earth heaved underfoot. The sky
spun on its axis. A queer brilliance lanced through billowing smoke,
and the people of Weep had to squint against it. Blowing grit and hot
light and the stink of saltpeter. There had been an explosion. They
might have died, all and easily, but only this girl had, shaken from
some pocket of the sky.
Her feet were bare, her mouth stained damson. Her pockets were all
full of plums. She was young and lovely and surprised and dead.
She was also blue.
Blue as opals, pale blue. Blue as cornflowers, or dragonfly wings, or a spring—not summer—sky.
Someone screamed. The scream drew others. The others screamed, too,
not because a girl was dead, but because the girl was blue, and this
meant something in the city of Weep. Even after the sky stopped reeling,
and the earth settled, and the last fume spluttered from the blast site
and dispersed, the screams went on, feeding themselves from voice to
voice, a virus of the air.
The blue girl’s ghost gathered itself and perched, bereft, upon the
spearpoint-tip of the projecting finial, just an inch above her own
still chest. Gasping in shock, she tilted back her invisible head and
gazed, mournfully, up.
The screams went on and on.
And across the city, atop a monolithic wedge of seamless,
mirror-smooth metal, a statue stirred, as though awakened by the tumult,
and slowly lifted its great horned head.
©Laini Taylor, STRANGE THE DREAMER, out September 2016 by Hodder & Stoughton
Thanks to Hodder and Stoughton for letting me publish this on my blog and roll on September!
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