New Books for the New Year

It's a brand-new year, and there are some brand-new books, some long-awaited and some surprises.




 Survive by Vera Nazarian The End is Here, in a Fiery Cosmic Apocalypse! Gwen Lark knows how to Qualify, Compete, and Win... The time has come to Survive. The Games of the Atlantis Grail have come to a ground-shaking halt and Gwen Lark, nerd, geek, and awkward smart girl, survived the remarkable ordeal, for the time being. But the worst is yet to come! Now, both the colony planet Atlantis and Earth are under a threat of annihilation, and everything is up in the air, including dire and stunning wonders in the Atlantean skies. Will there be a Wedding? Will there be a future for Gwen Lark, her beloved, and all their families, friends, and loved ones? Is Gwen’s rare and powerful talent, the Logos voice of creation, enough to resolve the greatest mystery of the Kassiopei Imperial Dynasty and its role in the events of deepest antiquity since the dawn of time? The fate of the entire human species is at stake, and now there can be no respite, not a moment to lose. The final battle is here, and Gwen, and everyone she knows and loves, are in for the greatest fight of their lives. It is time to survive. SURVIVE is the fourth and final book in The Atlantis Grail series, now an international cross-genre phenomenon, optioned for film.

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 The Motherland Knows by Joseph T. Major They thought he could help. The First Man in Space was under pressure. He had to regain his flight status. A friend had died for him. And from all over the Soviet Union, workers and other proletarians wrote him begging for help. Sometimes he could help And now, he was beginning to think, the Soviet Union was going the wrong way, a very wrong way. They might decide to solve some matters. A dead hero can't disagree with the authorities. So he reached out, to someone he had met, someone who was known, someone he thought he could trust. Then, on a cold and clear Christmas night, he took the most daring step -- and the world changed. In a tale of space flight, spying, and politics, people who thought they would never get into that sort of thing now found themselves propelled into it. A turbulent and tumultuous world is shaken into a different path, as leaders react to embarrassment with a desire for prestige, where the wish of a pilot is brought closer to coming through, and famous men are brought together, to find that enemies are more like them than they had imagined.

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Time of Daughters I by Sherwood Smith In a time of change and danger, peace sparks to war, and sons become daughters... It’s nearly a century after the death of Inda, the unbeatable Marlovan commander. Danet and Arrow, content in their arranged marriage, just want to live in peaceful obscurity and raise their family. But when a treaty sends them to the royal city to meet the heir to the throne, they discover that peace is fragile, old enemies have long memories, and what you want isn't always what you get. By the time they learn that you can’t go back again, events ignite a conflagration that no one could have foreseen—except for the ghosts who walk the walls in the royal city. This is the first half of an epic story of politics, war, family and magic in the beloved world of Sartorias-deles.

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Time of Daughters 2 by Sherwood Smith In a time of rising danger, women go to war, and ghosts walk the walls... A few years have passed since the Night of Four Kings, when the least expected candidates for rulership found themselves in charge of a disintegrating kingdom. These years of tenuous peace see their children reach adulthood. Threats from the border become raids, led by an idle noble with an eye to kingship. The two princes, Noddy and Connar, newly emerged from the military academy, are dispatched to patrol the troubled area until they find themselves under attack. Their loyalty to one another is strong, but what happens when one brother discovers a taste for war and the other a loathing for it? Matters of marriage and love tangle up with the menace of war. But the greatest threat of all comes when the world’s strongest army faces enemies from within. This is the concluding half of an epic story of politics, war, family and magic in the beloved world of Sartorias-deles.

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Also Sherwood Smith has been signal-boosting for Australian writers affected by the massive fires in that country. After seeing so many images of shocking destruction, a lot of us are asking how we can help. Right now, the best way we can help is to buy their books so that they will have some income to return home to and start over. There are several names of both authors and publishers who have lost everything, and who could really use some solid income streams right now, when everything is at its lowest.

Books, Books and More Books

Better than water, water everywhere, which is what our plumbing is threatening to give us. While we're trying to nurse a failing drain along until we can get a plumber out here to work on it, here are some delightfully spooky reads for Halloween.



Rachel and the Many-Splendored Dreamland by L. Jagi Lamplighter

It’s Halloween at the Roanoke Academy for the Sorcerous Arts, and Rachel Griffin is stirring up the dead!

All her life, Rachel has wanted to visit Beaumont Castle in the kingdom of Transylvania, the last known location of her hero, librarian-adventurer “Daring” Northwest. Only falling out of the land of dreams onto her face was not how she had expected to arrive.

Now, the castle is right there, looming over her. Only her best friend, the Princess of Magical Australia does not want to go in, so as to avoid an international incident. But what if the castle holds some clue as to her hero’s final fate?

And who was that mysterious figure hanging by the neck she glimpsed in the dreamlands, just before she fell. Could the Dead Men’s Ball, where the spooks and ghosts of the Hudson Highland gather once a year on Halloween to dance to the music of some very unexpected musicians, be the key to discovering the hanged man’s identity?

(The third in the Rachel Griffin series, which began with The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffith and continued in The Raven, the Elf, and Rachel, it will be on sale October 31 for Halloween.)



Cobweb Bride by Vera Nazarian

Many are called... She alone can save the world and become Death's bride.

COBWEB BRIDE (Cobweb Bride Trilogy, Book One) is a history-flavored fantasy novel with romantic elements of the Persephone myth, about Death's ultimatum to the world.

What if you killed someone and then fell in love with them?

In an alternate Renaissance world, somewhere in an imaginary "pocket" of Europe called the Kingdom of Lethe, Death comes, in the form of a grim Spaniard, to claim his Bride. Until she is found, in a single time-stopping moment all dying stops. There is no relief for the mortally wounded and the terminally ill....

Covered in white cobwebs of a thousand snow spiders she lies in the darkness... Her skin is cold as snow... Her eyes frozen... Her gaze, fiercely alive...

While kings and emperors send expeditions to search for a suitable Bride for Death, armies of the undead wage an endless war... A black knight roams the forest at the command of his undead father… Spies and political treacheries abound at the imperial Silver Court.... Murdered lovers find themselves locked in the realm of the living...

Look closer—through the cobweb filaments of her hair and along each strand shine stars...

And one small village girl, Percy—an unwanted, ungainly middle daughter—is faced with the responsibility of granting her dying grandmother the desperate release she needs.

As a result, Percy joins the crowds of other young women of the land in a desperate quest to Death's own mysterious holding in the deepest forests of the North…

And everyone is trying to stop her.



Blood Spirits by Sherwood Smith

Everyone's favorite sword-wielding California girl returns-from the author of Coronets and Steel.

With the man she loves set to marry a look-alike princess, Kim Murray returns to California from the magical country of Dobrenica to heal her broken heart. But family politics soon have her leaving for London, where she is forced into a duel with a Dobrenican nobleman. He reveals that her great sacrifice, leaving Alec, was a disaster. To fix her mistake, Kim returns to Dobrenica, but what she finds there is far more shocking and dangerous than she ever imagined. Not just politics and personalities but ghosts and magic, murder and mystery, await her as she struggles to understand the many faces of love. Once again Kim has to take sword in hand as she tries to make peace and learn the truth. Only, whose truth?

(The sequel to Coronets and Steel, it delves deeper into the supernatural elements of Sherwood Smith's Ruritanian kingdom of Dobrenica).



Steampunk Cthulhu by Brian Sammons and Glynn Owen Barrass, editors

"We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

So said H.P. Lovecraft in the first chapter of his most famous story, "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926). This is also the perfect introduction to Steampunk Cthulhu, for within these stories mankind has indeed voyaged too far, and scientific innovations have opened terrifying vistas of reality, with insanity and worse as the only reward.

The Steampunk genre has always incorporated elements of science fiction, fantasy, horror and alternative history, and certainly the Cthulhu Mythos has not been a stranger to Steampunk. But until now there has never been a Steampunk Cthulhu collection, so here are 18 tales unbound from the tethers of mere airships, goggles, clockwork, and tightly bound corsets; stories of horror, sci-fi, fantasy and alternative realities tainted with the Lovecraftian and the Cthulhu Mythos. Here you will discover Victorian Britain, the Wild West era United States, and many other varied locations filled with anachronistic and sometimes alien technology, airships, submersibles and Babbage engines. But the Victorian era here is not only one of innovation and exploration, but of destruction and dread.

(This anthology includes my own short story "The Baying of the Hounds," which features Gilded Age heroes Nikola Tesla and Thomas Alva Edison).



The Shadow over Leningrad by Leigh Kimmel

In Stalin's Soviet Union, Tikhon Grigoriev lives a precarious life. He knows too much. He's seen too much. A single misstep could destroy him, and if he stumbles, he will take his family down with him. With Leningrad besieged by Nazi armies, the danger has only increased.

He's not a man who wants to come to the notice of those in high places. But when he solved a murder that seemed supernatural, impossible, he attracted the attention of Leningrad's First Party Secretary.

So when a plot of land grows vegetables of unusual size and vigor, and anyone who eats them goes mad, who should be called upon to solve the mystery but Tikhon Grigoriev. However, these secrets could get him far worse than a bullet in the head. For during the White Nights the boundaries between worlds grow thin, and in some of those worlds humanity can have no place.

(The sequel to "Gnawing the Bones of the City," which was published in Fiction Vortex).

If you'd like to have your works included in future promo posts, let me know at leighkimmel@yahoo.com

Crossposted at The Starship Cat Blog and Through the Worldgate.

Making Time for Promo

I'm between events right now, but it doesn't mean I'm not busy. There's merchandise to manage and bookwork to do. And there is my other business, developing and maintaining AdSense websites, which has suffered from lack of attention for far too long. So it's easy to let the day slip away and discover it's gone and I still haven't done the promo post this week.



The Bandit Steals a City by Joseph T. Major

Ordinary worlds have problems with fanatics. So do faerie ones. The faerie worlds have ways to deal with them, but some may be very mundane and ordinary. And then there is the problem of cleaning up afterwards.
Our bandit and her husband the scholar have to deal with a family crisis, an evil that masquerades as good. Not to mention having to raise more of their kind, understand how their lives work, and provide for family of all sorts. There are so many things that go into life, and having it for longer only makes them accumulate.

(The second in the Lady Was a Bandit series, which began with The Death of a Bandit)



Pride and Platypus by Jane Austen and Vera Nazarian

From the critically acclaimed author of Mansfield Park and Mummies and Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons...

Pride and Platypus: Mr. Darcy’s Dreadful Secret

When the moon is full over Regency England, all the gentlemen are subject to its curse.

Mr. Darcy, however, harbors a Dreadful Secret...

Shape-shifting demons mingle with Australian wildlife, polite society, and high satire, in this elegant, hilarious, witty, insane, and unexpectedly romantic supernatural parody of Jane Austen's classic novel.

The powerful, mysterious, handsome, and odious Mr. Darcy announces that Miss Elizabeth Bennet is not good enough to tempt him. The young lady determines to find out his one secret weakness -- all the while surviving unwanted proposals, Regency balls, foolish sisters, seductive wolves, matchmaking mothers, malodorous skunks, general lunacy, and the demonic onslaught of the entire wild animal kingdom!

What awaits her is something unexpected. And only moon, matrimony, and true love can overcome pride and prejudice!

Gentle Reader -- this Delightful Illustrated Edition includes Scholarly Footnotes and Appendices

(Who ever thought lycanthropy could be funny?)



The Trouble with Kings by Sherwood Smith

“With music you can tell the truth about human experience.”

In this romantic fantasy set in the same world as Crown Duel, Flian is an ordinary princess who would rather be left with her music, but gets abducted not once, not twice—three times.

What is a civilized princess to do? Especially when she can’t tell which prince is the hero and which the villain!

Re-edited and reissued by Book View Cafe

(If Jane Austen were to write a novel in Sherwood's Sartorias-deles universe, it would look like this).



Lazarus Risen by Hayden Trenholm (ed.)

Dreams of immortality and eternal youth are almost as old as human culture itself. But what would the world look like if everyone could live and be young forever? What would it look like if only some of us had that privilege? Lazarus Risen presents sixteen stories from around the world that explore the economic, political, social and psychological consequences of life extension, human cloning, the hard upload and other forms of the biological singularity.

Stories by Brent Nichols, Sean McMullen, Teri Babcock, Nancy SM Waldman, Brad C. Anderson, Fiona Moore, Felice Picano, Matthew Shean, Matt Moore, Suzanne Church, Peter Wendt, Holly Schofield, Deborah Walker, Kevin Edwin Stadt, Leigh Kimmel, and Andrew Barton.

(This anthology contains my story "Phoenix Dreams," a companion story to The Crime and Glory of Antonia DeVilbiss.)



The Moon Mirror by Leigh Kimmel

Chelsea Ayles dreamed of going to the Moon since she was a child. Now her dream job at NASA has turned into a nightmare, thanks to those many blood-sucking arachnids. Yeah, politics, as in a Senator accusing her of destroying America's priceless heritage because she chose the moonrocks that were used to make a proof-of-concept mirror segment for a lunar telescope project. Now the mirror sits in her office like a bitter mockery of what might have been -- until the day her reflection turns into a handsome stranger who calls himself the Man in the Moon and offers her visions of a world that might have been. Visions that ignite a longing of an intensity she hasn't known since she was in grade school and watched videos of the Apollo lunar missions in science class.

(Another story that involves the Gus on the Moon universe).

Over at Sarah Hoyt's blog, Free Range Oyster has more interesting books for you to check out.

To get your book in next week's promotional posting, send me a note with the title and publication information atleighkimmel@yahoo.com

Crossposted at The Starship Cat blog and Through the Worldgate.

Back Home With Books

We're back home from Worldcon, and back into the beastly heat. A perfect time to curl up in a cool place with a good book.



The Eyes of a Doll by Rob Howell

Just another day in Achrida... All Edward Aethelredson wanted to do was to enjoy his ale, heal from his wounds, relax during the summer, and help his friend with what should have been nothing more than a pleasant ride in the country. Two bodies later, including one he kills in self-defense, Edward is drawn into the dark recesses of the Empire’s criminal underworld. He cannot flee, for that would impugn his honor. He cannot hide, for that would leave a six-year-old girl and her family in danger for merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He cannot attack, for he does not know who to strike at. With an ally who is more foe than friend and his back against the wall, can Edward find the cunning necessary to save his friends? Or will crime lords and deadly wizards spell the end of him?

(This is the second volume of the world of Shijuren, which began with A Lake Most Deep).



Silent Meridian by Elizabeth Crowens

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is obsessed with a legendary red book. Its peculiar stories have come to life, and rumors claim that it has rewritten its own endings. Convinced that possessing this book will help him write his ever-popular Sherlock Holmes stories, he takes on an unlikely partner, John Patrick Scott, known to most as a concert musician and paranormal investigator. Although in his humble opinion, Scott considers himself more of an ethereal archeologist and a time traveler professor.

Together they explore lost worlds and excavate realms beyond the knowledge of historians when they go back in time to find it. But everything backfires, and their friendship is tested to the limits. Both discover that karmic ties and unconscionable crimes have followed them like ghosts from the past, wreaking havoc on the present and possibly the future.

Silent Meridian reveals the alternate histories of Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Houdini, Jung and other notable luminaries in the secret diaries of a new kind of Doctor Watson, John Patrick Scott, in an X Files for the 19th century. Stay tuned for A Pocketful of Lodestones; book two in the Time Traveler Professor series by Elizabeth Crowens.

(If you like steampunk and time travel, take a look).



After the Sundial by Vera Nazarian

AFTER THE SUNDIAL by Vera Nazarian is the author's first short fiction collection that focuses specifically on science fiction works, and can be viewed as a companion volume to her earlier collection, SALT OF THE AIR which focused on fable, myth, and fantasy.

Bound by the common theme of time and temporal exploration, the ten selections here range widely from traditional speculative fiction to the surreal literary to poetry to bawdy adventure humor to space opera and far future speculation.

Includes an introduction by the author, two previously unpublished works and a full-length critically acclaimed novella THE CLOCK KING AND THE QUEEN OF THE HOURGLASS.

(One of my favorite single-author collections, I originally read it in uncorrected proof. And I still enjoy re-reading it, savoring the stories that range from pretty hard sf to mystical speculation that isn't exactly sf or fantasy, almost philosophical fiction).



Sasharia En Garde by Sherwood Smith

First published as two books—Once a Princess, and Twice a Prince—this romantic fantasy has been revised and published as one book, as first intended. It is set in the same world as Crown Duel, to which Sasha’s mother, Sun, was once swept away by a real prince.

But not to happily ever after. Her prince vanished, and a wicked king took the throne. Since then, Sasha and Sun have been hiding on Earth, both training in martial arts until Sasha is tricked into going back to Khanerenth.

She’s more than ready to kick some bad-guy butt, but is the stylish pirate Zathdar the bad guy? Or artistic, dreamy Prince Jehan, son of the wicked king?

Meanwhile Sun is determined to cross worlds to save her daughter. She might not have been a very good princess, but nobody messes with Mom!

(I originally read the two-volume version. A side story, but with ties to Crown Duel and A Stranger to Command. Because it's self-contained and starts on Earth, it may be a good entry point to the intricate world of Sartorias-deles).



The Ten Just Men by Joseph T. Major

The fighting in Europe is over but the war is not yet done. The allies cannot agree. The defeated must rebuild, faced with the problem of overcoming the last eleven years, of creating a new structure of society, of making some sort of economy.
All the while, the former allies are facing problems inside and out.
In the not very pacific Pacific, the power of the Allies is converging on the last enemy. The price needed to be paid to overcome them may be more than can be paid -- even if wonder weapons provide a final out.
In the midst of this tumult, ordinary people try to pick up and carry on, to bring new life into the world and to reconstruct existing life.
The war is grinding to an end . . . but only the dead have known the end of war.

(The fifth volume of Joseph T. Major's Alternate World War II series, it covers the time after VE Day, as Japan alone of the Axis remains to be defeated. This saga began in Bitter Weeds and continued in No Hint of War, The Road to the Sea and An Irresponsible Gang).



Visions V: Milky Way, edited by Carrol Fix

Visions V stories take place somewhere—anywhere—in the Milky Way Galaxy. Planets, stars, and aliens, with no limitations, form the subject and action taking place outside our Solar System and within the Milky Way.

Humankind has forded the immense stream of space between stars and reached our nearest solar neighbors. What will we discover on hospitable planets circling those new stars? Will we find almost familiar moons, asteroids, planetary rings? Or, could there be never before seen astronomical formations? The sky is no longer the limit for our soaring imaginations, because somewhere out there is a potential haven for the remnants of our beleaguered civilization.
Global catastrophe is a constant threat for our war-torn and dysfunctional human race. No one can foresee the future, but we have lived on the brink of extinction since the invention of the atomic bomb and, more recently, germ warfare and genetic manipulation.
Astrophysicist Professor Stephen Hawking has said, "I believe that the long term future of the human race must be space and that it represents an important life insurance for our future survival, as it could prevent the disappearance of humanity by colonizing other planets."
The vast Milky Way Galaxy may allow the seeds of our future to be widely distributed, past the danger of a final extinction.
Visions V: Milky Way brings together a collection of fascinating and entertaining stories by award-winning science fiction authors.

“Ships in the Night” by Jay Werkheiser
“End Around” by E. J. Shumak
“Unwanted Gifts” by S. M. Kraftchak
“Greatcloak” by Jonathan Shipley
“Claim Jumpers” by Doug C. Souza
“The Device” by Tara Campbell
“Where the Last Tramz Stops” by Sam Bellotto Jr.
“Eighteen Winters” by D. A. Couturier
“Yellow Star” by John Moralee
“The Shadow of a Dead God” by Leigh Kimmel
“Black Hearts and Blue Skins” by Timothy Paul
“Welcome to Your Dream House” by Steve Bates
“Pan Ad Aster” by Bruce C. Davis
“Rachel’s Fall” by Teresa Howard
“When Unknown Gods Leave” by Margaret Karmazin
“First Sunrise” by Marie Michaels
“Dropworld” by Fredrick Obermeyer
“Bright Horizon” by Thomas Olbert
“The Mirror Dialogues” by Richard Zwicker
“The Drive” by W. A. Fix

(Yet another anthology with a story of mine -- except why did I persistently remember the title as "The Long Shadow of a Dead God"? Was that an earlier working title, later edited away, or was it from some ot her work, now abandoned? Memory is such a tricky thing).



The Stirge by Leigh Kimmel

When Liphrel's family fell too far on their debts, he was sold to the priests of the death god. But his family were followers of the birth goddess, which left him in a difficult position.

(One of my first published stories, it was accepted right at a time when I was at the nadir of my life. Not only was I despairing of ever being published, I was starting to wonder if my life as a whole was ever going to improve. And then things turned around, and by the time it actually saw print, I was in considerably improved circumstances).

The Free-Range Oyster also has more cool book recommendations over at Sarah Hoyt's blog.

And as always, If you would like your work promoted in my blog, please e-mail me at leighkimmel@yahoo.com.

Crossposted at The Starship Cat and Through the Worldgate.

Language, Time and the Reader

I'd planned for today's post to be yet another review of a serialized novel at JukePop Serials. But then I saw a particularly interesting article over at Mad Genius Club, Sarah Hoyt's writing blog. So I've decided to delay my review of C. Rye's Sibling Moons to a later date, and we'll have a little change of pace.

Cedar Sanderson takes us through a Fantastic Journey Through Time, examining the language used in some of her favorite fantasy works, from the Red Fairy Book, which was published at the close of the nineteenth century, through one of Jim Butcher's most recent novels. A span of a little over a century, not nearly enough for language to change to the point of being incomprehensible, but certainly enough that, even with  mass literacy, stylistic changes become noticeable.

The most obvious change is the move from a more formal and scholarly level of diction toward a more conversational style. The earliest examples have a bookish feel to them, a sense of an elevated phraseology even with the occasional contraction or other construction generally stigmatized in formal writing. It's not just what is often called a timeless style -- instead, the prose seems almost deliberately constructed to create a sense of antiquity, of the story having been transmitted from the distant past.

By the time we come to JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, we see a shift in tone away from that effort to imitate the (sometimes ponderous) diction of the classics of Greece and Rome, and toward a more contemporary tone. Not yet casual or breezy, but almost the sense of a father sitting by the fire and telling the story to a circle of wide-eyed children. Maybe a Victorian or Edwardian father, but still a recognizably modern one telling a story in a contemporary voice rather than one intended to hearken back to older forms of storytelling.

With Robert A. Heinlein's Glory Road the transformation is complete. Our hero's speech is casual, down-home and unpretentious, even when addressing the princess. And he's genre-savvy, referring to Edgar Rice Burroughs' fictional Mars -- not to mention his suggestion that the princess might be wearing a cave-woman outfit of fake fur made by a chemical company.

The last two novels Cedar mentions are notable for being crossovers with other genres. In the Discworld series Terry Pratchett isn't just writing fantasy, but humorous fantasy. Instead of the larger-than-life characters of epic fantasy, we have absurd characters who elicit a chuckle by their antics. In this bit of dialog we have several standard fairy tale tropes, but all back-to-front and turned on their heads, to the point it becomes ridiculous.

Similarly, in the Henry Dresden novels Jim Butcher is writing urban fantasy, a subgenre in which magic intrudes into a contemporary setting to create a world in which wonder takes on a modern industrial sensibility rather than that of the pre-scientific world we see in epic and heroic fantasy. Furthermore, we have the elements of detective fiction, and specifically the hardboiled detective. The presentation of Maeve could be any femme fatale from any of a dozen hardboiled detective novels by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler or the like.

And thus we have, at the conclusion of this look backward, the question of whether it is obligatory for a contemporary writer to use contemporary language, especially when retelling classic stories. And then I think of Vera Nazarian, a contemporary fantasist whose immigrant background resulted in her having relatively little exposure to contemporary literature, instead growing up immersed in classical fairy tales and mythology of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, a very different literary tradition from that familiar to most readers. As a result, her English prose has a richness and intricacy that often strikes readers accustomed to minimalist transparent prose as  heavy, even overworked. Because so many of the gatekeepers of traditional publishing have been educated in the minimalist mainstream, Ms. Nazarian has struggled for the better part of three decades just to get published, and only with the emergence of indie e-publishing has she finally been able to come into her own as a writer.

Norilana Moving Sale

After a years-long battle to save her home finally ended in defeat this past winter, Vera Nazarian is moving cross-country to a rental in Vermont. In order to fund this cross-country move, she really needs a lot of sales of her Norilana books.

If you're not sure what you might like, take a look at these reviews from The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf:

Mansfield Park and Mummies

Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons

The Duke in His Castle

Sky Whales and Other wonders

After the Sundial

Clockwork Phoenix 2

Clockwork Phoenix 3

Warrior Wisewoman 2

Warrior Wisewoman 3

Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword & Sorceress XXIII

Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword & Sorceress XXIV