Recommended Reading from SubPress
While we’d be happy to see you spend your entire book budget here at SubPress, we read pretty far and wide ourselves. SubPress Director of Production, Yanni Kuznia, has recommendations for a couple of 2010 titles that you might find of interest.
Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay
Epic Fantasy! Horses! Intrigue! Horses! A reader could be excused if, after seeing the cover and reading the flap copy, she assumed that Under Heaven was your standard epic fantasy tale with horses at the center. She could be excused but she would be dead wrong and missing out on what I consider one of the best reads of the year to date. Oh don’t worry, there are horses and they are important, but this isn’t your standard boy-and-his-horse-type tale. Kay’s Under Heaven is a well-developed world similar to that of the Tang Dynasty of China. With a few deft words, he places the reader in the appropriate time, place, and most difficult, culture, saving most of his words for what appears to be the story of Shen Tai, but in reality is the story of an empire. There are plots within plots, threads that seem to be connected but in reality have little to do with each other, and schemes that surprise you in their reach.
Embers by Laura Bickle
Urban fantasy is quickly becoming one of those genres that is harder and harder in which to be a unique voice, but with Embers Laure Bickle manages to be just that. Eschewing the werewolves and vampires that one usually finds in urban fantasy, Bickle explores ghosts and mediums in Detroit, a half-deserted city with abandoned buildings galore, which lends itself well to her fast-paced ghost story. Bickle’s protagonist Anya, while the oft-seen damaged heroine, is believable and interesting to follow through her investigation of a series of arsons that Anya is convinced are paranormal in nature, her nature in fact. My only disappointment, and it’s a slight one at that, is Embers’s ending. Bickle obviously wrote this to be the beginning of a series centered around Anya, but I think the story would have been stronger if Bickle had taken the path less chosen.