Abhorsen – Garth Nix

What happens

This book concludes the series begin with Sabriel and Lirael. There’s another naughty necromancer trying to destroy the world, and various young folks have to join forces to stop them from doing so. It’s set about 20 years after Sabriel, and straight after Lirael, and stars Sabriel’s children and Lirael.

In the process Lirael discovers her true heritage, Sabriel’s son Sameth stops being a wuss, we finally find out what the Disreputable Dog really is and everyone spends a lot of time running away from zombies. It all ends satisfactorily, though not without some losses and a shed load of magic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lirael – Garth Nix

What happens

Teenage Lirael lives in a glacier-topped mountain with a sisterhood of seers called the Clayr. She’s a dark-haired, loneoy misfit in a society of smug, clairvoyant blondes, and gets progressively more miserable as her own clairvoyance stubbornly refuses to surface. So she gets a job in the library (a deeply magical place itself) and begins exploring. In the process she makes her way through a series of slightly Dungeons & Dragons-ish challenges, gains a mysterious magical dog friend, and begins to develop a sense of her own identity.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sabriel – Garth Nix

What happens

On one side of a kind of occult Berlin Wall is the Old Country, a kingdom run on standard fantasy-fiction feudal lines. In the Old Kingdom, magic works: the kingdom is founded on the Charter, a kind of magical pact that lets adepts use the source code of the universe to make things happen. And mages that don’t adhere to the Charter, but use Free Magic, are bad and naughty and forever raising the dead. So, to protect the world, one wizard is able to use both – the Abhorsen. It’s his or her job to chase zombies back to the land of the dead, stop necromancers from raising more, and generally keep the peace between life and death.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Year Of Our War – Steph Swainston

What happens:

The story is set in the Fourlands, an alter-world with a climate a bit like northern Europe. It is narrated by Comet Jant Shira, a drug-addicted cross between two humanoid races and the only person in his world who can fly. He’s a member of the Castle Circle, an elite group of immortals whose job it is to protect ordinary humans from the depredations of giant, hostile insects that come from who knows where.

Read the rest of this entry »