Waiting On Wednesday: The Magician's Land

Waiting on Wednesday is hosted by Breaking the Spine, a great place to geek out over upcoming books!

My pick for this week is The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman, to be published by Viking in August. I’ve really enjoyed this series so far (yes, despite Quentin’s whining!) so I can’t wait for the conclusion. And not just because I share the same somewhat-guilty love of Narnia that seems to permeate these books! The Magician King had an excellent ending, and I do want to know what happens to Quentin now he’s been flung back into the real world. Plus the blurb is promising epic things. Ah portal fantasies, how I love you.

Quentin Coldwater has been cast out of Fillory, the secret magical land of his childhood dreams. With nothing left to lose he returns to where his story began, the Brakebills Preparatory College of Magic. But he can’t hide from his past, and it’s not long before it comes looking for him.

Along with Plum, a brilliant young undergraduate with a dark secret of her own, Quentin sets out on a crooked path through a magical demi-monde of gray magic and desperate characters. But all roads lead back to Fillory, and his new life takes him to old haunts, like Antarctica, and to buried secrets and old friends he thought were lost forever. He uncovers the key to a sorcery masterwork, a spell that could create magical utopia, a new Fillory—but casting it will set in motion a chain of events that will bring Earth and Fillory crashing together. To save them he will have to risk sacrificing everything.

The Magician’s Land is an intricate thriller, a fantastical epic, and an epic of love and redemption that brings the Magicians trilogy to a magnificent conclusion, confirming it as one of the great achievements in modern fantasy. It’s the story of a boy becoming a man, an apprentice becoming a master, and a broken land finally becoming whole.

Waiting on Wednesday: Posion Fruit by Jacqueline Carey

Waiting on Wednesday is hosted by Breaking the Spine, a great place to geek out over upcoming books!

My pick for this week is Poison Fruit (Agent of Hel #3) by Jacqueline Carey. It’s coming out in October and is the final book in her Agent of Hel series, so I’m expecting slew of delicious magical chaos for Daisy. It’s going to be awesome. Possibly more exciting than that (for me, anyway) is that Jacqueline Carey will have to start writing a new series now this one is over. Fingers crossed for something epic!

The hot-as-Hel series with the “Sookie Stackhouse type of vibe” (Paranormal Horizon) is back—but this time the paranormal Midwestern town of Pemkowet is feeling a frost in the air and the residents are frozen in fear...

The Pemkowet Visitors Bureau has always promoted paranormal tourism—even if it has downplayed the risks (hobgoblins are unpredictable). It helps that the town is presided over by Daisy Johanssen, who as Hel’s liaison is authorized by the Norse goddess of the dead to keep Pemkowet under control. Normally, that’s easier to do in the winter, when bracing temperatures keep folks indoors.

But a new predator is on the prowl, and this one thrives on nightmares. Daisy is on her trail and working intimately with her partner and sometime lover from the Pemkowet PD, sexy yet unavailable werewolf Cody Fairfax. But even as the creature is racking up innocent victims, a greater danger looms on Pewkowet’s horizon.

As a result of a recent ghost uprising, an unknown adversary—represented by a hell-spawn lawyer with fiery powers of persuasion—has instigated a lawsuit against the town. If Pemkowet loses, Hel’s sovereignty will be jeopardized, and the fate of the eldritch community will be at stake. The only one who can prevent it is Daisy—but she’s going to have to confront her own worst nightmare to do it.

Waiting on Wednesday: The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

Waiting on Wednesday is hosted by Breaking the Spine, a great place to geek out over upcoming books!

My pick for this week is The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters, to be published in September by Riverhead. And why? Because Waters is a stunning author - Fingersmith is possibly my favourite non-SFF book ever, The Night Watch was beautiful and melancholy, and her other books are awesome too. And this one! I was a bit worried when I first read the blurb – it doesn’t make it clear that there are lesbians in it, and her last novel, The Little Strangers, didn’t have any queer content – but apparently she’s not making this a trend. Plus all the reviews have said glowing things about both the romance and the overall tension in this book. I seriously can’t wait.


From the bestselling author of The Little Stranger and Fingersmith, an enthralling novel about a widow and her daughter who take a young couple into their home in 1920s London.

It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa—a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants—life is about to be transformed as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.

With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the “clerk class,” the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances’s life—or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be.

Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three times, Sarah Waters has earned a reputation as one of our greatest writers of historical fiction, and here she has delivered again. A love story, a tension-filled crime story, and a beautifully atmospheric portrait of a fascinating time and place, The Paying Guests is Sarah Waters’s finest achievement yet.