The Leaning Pile of Books is a feature where I talk about books I got over the last week – old or new, bought or received for review consideration (often unsolicited). Since I hope you will find new books you’re interested in reading in these posts, I try to be as informative as possible. If I can find them, links to excerpts, author’s websites, and places where you can find more information on the book are included.
There are two books to discuss this week, including one of my most anticipated releases of the year!
Stories of the Raksura: Volume 2 by Martha Wells
This second volume of stories about the Raksura will be released on June 2 (trade paperback, ebook). It contains two novellas and three short stories. “The Dead City” is a novella about Moon before the beginning of the first novel. The novella “The Dark Earth Below” and the short stories “Mimesis” and “Trading Lesson” take place after the third novel. The short story “The Almost Last Voyage of the Wind-ship Escarpment” focuses on different characters in the same world.
I love the three novels in The Books of the Raksura (The Cloud Roads, The Serpent Sea, and The Siren Depths). The Three Worlds is a unique setting, and the main characters are quite endearing. I’m reading Stories of the Raksura: Volume 1 right now, and so far I’m enjoying that very much as well.
Moon, Jade, and other favorites from the Indigo Cloud Court return with two new novellas from Martha Wells.
Martha Wells continues to enthusiastically ignore genre conventions in her exploration of the fascinating world of the Raksura. Her novellas and short stories contain all the elements fans have come to love from the Raksura books: courtly intrigue and politics, unfolding mysteries that reveal an increasingly strange wider world, and threats both mundane and magical.
“The Dead City” is a tale of Moon before he came to the Indigo Court. As Moon is fleeing the ruins of Saraseil, a groundling city destroyed by the Fell, he flies right into another potential disaster when a friendly caravanserai finds itself under attack by a strange force. In “The Dark Earth Below,” Moon and Jade face their biggest adventure yet; their first clutch. But even as Moon tries to prepare for impending fatherhood, members of the Kek village in the colony tree’s roots go missing, and searching for them only leads to more mysteries as the court is stalked by an unknown enemy.
Stories of Moon and the shape changers of Raksura have delighted readers for years. This world is a dangerous place full of strange mysteries, where the future can never be taken for granted and must always be fought for with wits and ingenuity, and often tooth and claw. With these two new novellas, Martha Wells shows that the world of the Raksura has many more stories to tell…
The Gods of Laki by Chris Angus
The Gods of Laki will be available on June 9 (trade paperback with the audiobook scheduled for release in July).
From the author of Flypaper comes an adventure about mysterious underground volcanic forces and a savage plot to alter the Earth’s climate.
A race to unveil the secret of Laki, a volcano on the southern shores of Iceland, pits our heroes—a sixteen-year-old Viking girl from the tenth century, a German geologist from World War II, and a former Secret Service agent protecting a female volcanologist—against evil forces with a plan to cause an eruption using explosives, altering the global climate through the release and forcing the price of oil to skyrocket.
Everyone and everything on Laki is in danger, including the possibility of ever unraveling the mysteries of the place, as it faces burial beneath a carpet of lava flows. Caught underground by the fracturing physical breakup of Laki, everyone finds themselves ensnared by Laki itself—an unseen, implacable foe that seems everything but a benign presence. Every move they make appears to be guided and controlled by an intelligence that permeates the netherworld.
Only gradually, through all the conflict between the various factions, does everyone begin to realize that it is Laki itself that has always been in charge.
