Debuts of 2014

New Year, new author. Well five new authors in fact.

We thought we’d kick off 2014 with a brief introduction to the five authors we’re proud to be bringing to you for the first time on the Gollancz list this year. Whether you like SF thrillers, high fantasy, epic fantasy with a sharp twist, time travel stories, or fantasy cities we’re sure we’ve got something for you with a crop of five writers writing their first novel for Gollancz. Each writer brings a different style, different strengths. But all of them have made the team here fall in love with their writing and all present an intriguing (if hugely varied) collection of characters for you to fall for, feel for or fear. We’ve always tried to present the widest spread of genre writing at Gollancz and insofar as its possible to show the full width of the fantastic via the work of only five authors we really do hope there’s something here for everyone. So, in order of publication, on to the books.

On 20th March  The Boy With The Porcelain Blade steps into our lives courtesy of Den Patrick. Den has written for Gollancz before (his hugely entertaining fantasy race war manuals came out in 2013) but this is his first novel. It’s a beautifully wrought story of a young man finding his way through the dark heart of fantasy state not unlike a Renaissance Italian city state. There’s an intriguing back story, terrifying levels of deceit and a horrifying secret at the centre of it all but the star of the piece is the brilliantly engaging hero: Lucien.

On the 19th June you can meet a very different protagonist at the heart of a very different novel. Jon Wallace’s first novel, Barricade, is a brutal road-trip of a novel through a world we’ve destroyed in the company of a character who wants to kill us all. But it’s also a search for a personal truth buried in the past. Imagine Richard Morgan writing Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and you are some of the way towards imagining just how exciting this novel is.

On the 17th July we publish a novel written by Anna Caltabiano when she was only seventeen. The Seventh Miss Hatfield is Anna’s second novel (she published her first on her own, ending up with over 200,000 twitter followers as a result). The easiest way to describe this clever and enchanting story is that it charts a search for the secret of immortality and a love affair between a young woman and a young man conducted over a gap of a hundred years.

On the 14th August you can join two mercenaries employed by a vast and corrupt empire as they pursue a party of natives who have kidnapped a woman. But, as you would hope, nothing is quite as it first seems in John Hornor Jacobs’ wonderfully different epic fantasy, The Incorruptibles. This is a tale of troubled courage and steadfastness in a world where there are no moral certainties. This is a fantasy with a world quite unlike any you have travelled through before. There are surprises at every turn.

And finally on the 18th September let Ed Cox take you into the Labyrinth of The Relic Guild. With its split time-line, superb characters and bewitching setting of a vast city cut off from the realms around it where magic is ruthlessly supressed this is a dark and exciting fantasy set in a city which itself becomes a living, breathing character. It’s a remarkably original tale for any writer to have come up with, that it is Ed’s first novel is even more remarkable.

All these books will be Gollancz books of the month and if you’ve signed up to be a Gollancz Geek (see here for details) you’ll be getting a chance to read them early.  Either way find out a little more about them here at the Fantasy Faction site, along with tips for the year from our fellow genre publishers.

2014 promises to be a good year for readers and a good year for new authors as well as established names. Here’s to very year being like that.