Library Journal: Award-winning Kowal (“The Glamourist” series) has a good feel for the era, creating a premise and setting that make this a refreshing historical fantasy. American Ginger Stuyvesant is able to channel the spirits of the dead. Her skills, along with those of other psychics, are being put to use by a special branch of the British Army known as the Spirit Corps during World War I. Working out of a base in Le Havre, Ginger leads one of several circles whose members take intelligence from deceased soldiers who report what they saw on the battlefields. One day a fighter checks in who has been killed by a British officer, not a German enemy. Ginger has a hard time getting her male superior officers to take her seriously, but she is tenacious as she pulls on the threads of a mystery that threatens the whole of the Spirit Corps.
Jul 182016
Japanese rights to Mike Shepherd’s KRIS LONGKNIFE: UNDAUNTED, the 7th book in the series, to Hayakawa Publishing, Inc., by Kohei Hattori at the English Agency in association with Jennifer Jackson and Michael Curry.
Tor.com: Lee knows that if the fate of the world is at stake, the reader has to care about that world, so he uses language as a way to reveal a beauty that can be found even in the depths of an interstellar war. He builds more in a couple of sentences than some authors manage in entire novels, and beautifully.
Chicago Tribune: Palmer’s most innovative strategy isn’t futuristic technology but rather the archaic and digressive 18th-century voice in which she (or Canner) has chosen to tell the tale. The result is a richly detailed, very odd future couched in language that recalls Henry Fielding more than Robert Heinlein (though there are occasional nods to science fiction along the way).
Molly Tanzer’s CREATURES OF WILL AND TEMPER, a Victorian-era urban fantasy pitched as inspired by THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, in which an epee-fencing enthusiast and her younger sister are drawn into a secret and dangerous London underworld of pleasure-seeking demons and bloodthirsty diabolists, with only her skill with a blade standing between them and certain death, to John Joseph Adams Books, in a two-book deal, for publication in fall 2017, by Cameron McClure.
UK/Commonwealth rights to 10 books in Emily Brightwell’s ongoing Mrs. Jeffries Mysteries series (#14-23) to Constable & Robinson, by Meg Davis at Ki Agency, on behalf of Donald Maass.
ongratulations to Nnedi Okorafor on Binti being a Best Novella nominee and to Tananarive Due on Ghost Summer being a Best Collection nominee for the 2016 British Fantasy Awards!
Michael Fletcher’s SWARM AND STEEL, a fantasy novel set in a harsh world where belief defines reality, in which Zerfall Seele, thousands of years old and creator of a punishing afterlife sees her creation through unbiased eyes for the first time and vows to destroy it, to Bradley Englert at Talos Press, by Cameron McClure.