Fantasy

In the Summer of 1998, instead of playing football with my twelve year old friends, I was having a Knightmare. Successfully passing the audition process,  we arrive at the reception of Anglia Studios in Norwich. Here we meet the current team from Oxfordshire (who will go on to be the first team to conquer the dungeon). The production always holds one team in reserve as they never know when the next team will finish.

Taking us down to the studio to begin our adventure, we cross the floor over cables and past cameras to the three stools that sit in front of the chest. Treguard sits behind us and we do a run through of the first room to get rid of any nerves. I look up from the television in the chest, which is the same as for the viewer at home, and see one of the production staff walking around in red slippers.

Gollancz is thrilled to be able to reveal the cover for one of the most exciting debuts of 2013!

We love this artwork from the exceptional Larry Rostant, and this cover was put together for us by the talented Nick May!

The Path of Anger is one of the most hotly anticipated fantasy debuts this year – not only for us, either! This book is going to be a real international event, with simultaneous publication planned with Bragelonne in France , Heyne in Germany, Planeta in Spain and Mynx in Holland. It’s going to be amazing. But don’t just take our word for it (or our gif!) here’s a little teaser for the book is actually about:

 An Empire has been overthrown. An Emperor has been murdered. A Republic has risen from the ashes . . . but the old grudges still remain. 

Now an assassin has begun to strike, systematically, from the shadows.

There will be blood.
There will be death.
This is the path of anger . . . 

We can’t wait to share this novel with you. We know that November is a long way off, but we’ll be sharing more extracts, teasers and competitions to win early copies as we countdown!

Let us know what you think of the cover in the comments.

This post has been a little while in coming. Truth be told I hadn’t much expected it to ever happen – after all, ask anyone and they’ll tell you short story collections don’t sell in the UK. And yet here I am, with another lovely Larry Rostant cover to admire and my name on another book. Now they’re all special – you publish a book that isn’t special to you and it either will be your last or should be. Even for a professional author, each one remains a constant for a period of your life and should trigger an emotion as strong as the smell of freshly cut grass. Where you wrote the book, who you lived with or drank with – they’re all bound up with each one but God Tattoo encompassed most of my adult life as it turned out.

We are delighted to share with you a saucy, well on the borderline of saucy, reading from Sarah Pinborough’s new novella Poison.

Take a wicked queen, a handsome prince, a beautiful princess and a poisoned apple . . .

It’s Snow White, but not as you know her.

A wicked, delicious, sexy fairy tale perfect for fans of Once Upon a Time and Fifty Shades of Grey.

Listen to the extract below carefully and send along the answer to this question:  In the passage about when the sunlight glittered on the drops of water that clung to her skin, Sarah uses a simile to compare the drops of water to what ? It’s a tricky question but we have five beautiful signed copies to give away to five lucky winners! Send your answers to competitions@orionbooks.co.uk with the subject line: POISON by 11.59 on the 25th April 2013. Good luck!