Congratulations to DMLA author, Kate Heartfield, for her 2023 Aurora Awards win!
BEST NOVEL
Also, huge shoutout to Premee Mohamed and C.L. Polk for their nominations! Premee Mohamed was nominated for best novel with her work, The Void Ascendant, and C.L. Polk for best novelette with Even Though I Knew the End.
Created by historian and futurist sibling authors, A Second Chance for Yesterday is a clever and time-twisting story exploring life, redemption and quantum entanglements.
Nev Bourne is a hotshot programmer for the latest and greatest tech invention out there: SavePoint, the brain implant that rewinds the seconds of all our most embarrassing moments. She’s been working non-stop on the next rollout, even blowing off her boyfriend, her best friend and her family to make SavePoint 2.0. But when she hits go on the test-run, she wakes up the next day only to discover it’s yesterday. She’s falling backwards in time, one day at a time.
As things spiral out of control, a long-lost friend from college reappears in her life claiming they know how to save her. Airin is charming and mysterious, and somehow knows Nev intimately well. Desperate and intrigued, Nev takes a leap of faith. A friendship born of fear slowly becomes a bond of deepest trust, and possibly love. With time running out, and the whole world of SavePoint users at stake, Nev must learn what it will take to set things right, and what it will cost.
A huge congratulations to all our DMLA authors who were named as finalists in this years World Fantasy Awards!
Special Award – Non-Professional
Congratulations to DMLA authors Cassandra Khaw and Eugen Bacon for making the 2023 British Fantasy Awards shortlist!
The year is 1328 and Bruges is under siege by the Chatelaine of Hell and her army of chimeras – —creatures forged in the deep fires of the Hellbeast.
At night, revenants crawl over the walls and bring plague and grief to this city of widows. Margriet de Vos learns she’s a widow herself when her good-for-nothing husband comes home dead from the war. But he didn’t come back for her. The revenant who was her husband pulls a secret treasure of coins and weapons from under his floorboards and goes back through the mouth of the beast called Hell.
Margriet killed her first soldier when she was eleven. She’s buried six of her seven children. She’ll do anything for her daughter, even if it means raiding Hell itself to get her inheritance back.
Margriet’s daughter Beatrix is haunted by a dead husband of her own, and blessed, or cursed, with an enchanted distaff that allows her to control the revenants and see the future.
Together with a transgender man-at-arms who has unfinished business with the Chatelaine, a traumatised widow with a giant water-powered forgehammer at her disposal, and a wealthy alderman’s wife who escapes Bruges with her children, Margriet and Beatrix forge a raiding party the likes of which Hell has never seen…
Publishers Weekly: Transporting readers to a blood-soaked Ireland, Sharpson (When the Sparrow Falls) delivers modern horror at its best. One stormy night in 1979, Etain comes across a faceless corpse on the road; days later, she’s found half dead near a burnt-out farmhouse, her shattered mind a blank. Then, one of her twin daughters disappears in 1989, and soon after, her husband is found dead in a suspected suicide. By 2003, the only person still looking for an explanation to this mysterious series of events is Etain’s surviving daughter, Ashling, a university drama student who’s just entering into a passionate love affair with a woman. Ashling’s convinced, however, that what she remembers of her sister’s disappearance can’t possibly be true: it involved a popular children’s TV show about a goat puppet that would only come out of his box if someone had been very bad. According to everyone else who watched the show, the box never actually opened—but Ashling remembers it differently, and the more she investigates, the more she comes to fear that what’s inside is no cuddly puppet, but something old, crafty, and hungry. Sharpson does a masterful job of weaving together the three timelines, handling each story with tremendous sensitivity and skill while supplying genuine scares. By turns tender and terrifying, sexy and stomach-turning, heartwarming and heartrending, this folklore-steeped exploration of generational trauma is a high-water mark for the Irish horror novel.
Publishers Weekly: Heartfield (The Chatelaine) injects some magic into European history with this lush and enchanting outing. In 1768, close-knit sisters Charlotte and Antoine, daughters of the Habsburg emperor, are sent their separate ways to marry powerful husbands: Charlotte to Naples and the brutish King Ferdinand, and Antoine to France, where she is renamed Marie Antoinette and weds the future King Louis XVI. Isolated and alone, the two rely on lessons from a book of spells they discovered as children to reclaim power over their lives while trying to do right for their respective nations. As tension mounts both politically and in the magical world, the sisters find themselves on opposing sides, turning from close confidants to bitter rivals. Heartfield’s accounts of both queens are detailed and insightful, with a fresh take on Marie Antoinette and a fascinating look at her less famous sister. The magic system, which demands a sacrifice for each spell cast, is a cool concept, but in execution it’s a bit murky and occasionally feels like an afterthought to the story at hand. Still, fans of historical novels looking for just a touch of the fantastic are sure to be sucked in.
Cairo, 1869. When a bomb goes off at the Khedivial Opera House celebrating the opening of the new Suez Canal, visiting Assassin Pierrette Arnaud investigates, only to uncover a plot to eradicate free will… To her surprise, her old friend and teacher Simeon Price arrives in Egypt on the same trail, seven years after they allied to stop the Templars in London. But there’s no time to reminisce as the Templars maneuver Europe and Africa like pieces on a chessboard, wreaking havoc on a global scale. As Simeon and Pierrette race to stop further attacks, they unearth plans suggesting a mysterious tower is the key to the ultimate Templar takeover… and with the puzzling Engine of History in their grasp, the Assassins might be outmatched at last.
Finnish rights to Nebula and Hugo Award winner Martha Wells’ ROGUE PROTOCOL and EXIT STRATEGY, the third and fourth installments in the New York Times bestselling Murderbot Diaries series, to Hertta Kustannus Oy, by Rik Kleuver at Sebes & Bisseling Literary Agency in association with Michael Curry for Jennifer Jackson.
French renewal rights to New York Times bestselling author Jim Butcher’s FURIES OF CALDERON, the first book in the Codex Alera series, to Bragelonne, by Marie-France Heinic at Anna Jarota Agency in association with Michael Curry for Jennifer Jackson.
Croatian rights to New York Times bestselling author Martha Wells’ ALL SYSTEMS RED, ARTIFICIAL CONDITION, ROGUE PROTOCOL, EXIT STRATEGY, NETWORK EFFECT, and FUGITIVE TELEMETRY, the first six titles in the Murderbot Diaries series, to V.B.Z., by Milena Kaplarević at Prava i prevodi in association with Michael Curry for Jennifer Jackson.
Chinese rights to James Scott Bell’s POWER UP YOUR FICTION, to China Renmin University Press, by Yijhen Lee at The Grayhawk Agency in association with Katie Shea Boutillier for Donald Maass.
Spanish rights to Sue Burke’s SEMIOSIS, to Dolmen, by Elena Rodriguez at International Editors Co. in association with Katie Shea Boutillier for Jennie Goloboy.
Spanish audio rights to New York Times bestselling author Martha Wells’ ALL SYSTEMS RED, ARTIFICIAL CONDITION, ROGUE PROTOCOL, and EXIT STRATEGY, the first four titles in the Murderbot Diaries series, to Recorded Books, by Elena Rodríguez at International Editors Co. in association with Michael Curry for Jennifer Jackson.
Chinese rights to Ronald Malfi’s COME WITH ME and BLACK MOUTH, to Sharp Point Press, by Gray Tan of The Grayhawk Agency, in association with Katie Shea Boutillier for Cameron McClure.
Publishers Weekly: Shirley (Halo: Broken Circle) veers from gaming fiction to near-future military techno-thriller in this competent, straightforward novel of U.S. Army Rangers in space. Lt. Art Burkett’s marriage is failing due to his wife’s worries over his continuous insertion into dangerous missions, when he is yanked away yet again, this time into a hostage rescue that involves a drop from space. The mission runs into complications: an undercover agent is killed by friendly fire, the agent’s brother vows vengeance, and the Russians look to solidify their hold on near-Earth orbit by finishing off the spacecraft carrying Burkett and company back to safety. Shirley includes most of the archetypes common to military adventure fiction, including the officer torn between public and private duty, the spy whose suspicions are not mere paranoia, the gruff leader who stands up to the Big Brass, and the Big Brass themselves, whose pettiness is paid for by personal sacrifice. Sure-footed descriptions of spaceflight and the toils of working without gravity enhance the plot without the technobabble ever pulling focus from the soldiers as they fight for their lives and honor. Shirley’s fans will be pleased.