This week my giveaway for two copies of Night Owls has ended. I decided I could randomly choose two winners myself, or I could assign everyone who entered a number and have two people at my work (who know absolutely nothing about my website) pick two numbers. The two winners (as chosen by two kind people I work with) are:

Ria Bridges of the Great White North, eh (Canada). 

And

Cheryl from Sunny California

Congratulations to both of you!!

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This week I have another giveaway going on. This one is world wide, so residents of planet earth, feel free to enter. One person will win both Blood and Iron by Jon Sprunk and The Barrow by Mark Smylie. Check out the details here.

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As for the books I’m working on, well, I hate to say it, but I’m not really working on that many and it is all Stephanie Saulter’s fault. I was excited about her book Gemsigns (I am a total sucker for the idea of a contagion permanently altering society). I didn’t expect to enjoy her book this much. I can’t put the damn thing down. It’s all I think about. I go to work, and I hypothesize about what will happen next. My coworker today commented that the book must be amazing because I haven’t had it out of my hands all week. I just regret that I haven’t had more time to read it, or I would have finished it a hundred times over by now. Amazing stuff, here.

I also started City of Stairs, the new book by Robert Jackson Bennett (another favorite author of mine). This book should be released in September, and it is well worth keeping an eye on. It’s deep, and reminds me quite a bit of K.J. Parker in both depth, subtlety and humor. Very, very good. If it keeps being this good, it might become (in my opinion) Bennett’s best book yet.

The Lost by Sarah Beth Durst is a book I picked up for the hell of it. The author’s name is Sarah and so is mine, so why not read her book. You know how that goes. I’ve never read anything by this author before, but now I’m thinking I probably should. Some incredible writing here. I’m a little less excited about the actual plot, but this is the sort of book I’d read and love for the writing itself. I have a feeling the plot will end up enchanting me fairly soon. I just started it, so I’m not a fantastic judge yet.

I’m still plugging away with Words of Radiance (and loving it more and more and more.. I mean, wow!). It’s just so damn big so my going is really slow. These other books are easier to read while I’m putzing around the house or doing whatever. They are smaller and easier to manage. Not Words of Radiance. This book requires some dedicated time that has been hard to come by recently. Regardless, I’m savoring every page of it. Very impressive.

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Now onto books I’m eyeing.

The purpose of Books I’m Eyeing is to shine a light on the websites I frequent. I hope to thank them for their amazing talent, let them know they are not speaking into a vacuum (your contributions to the genre matter), and hopefully send some love their directions.

So, What are you eyeing?

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Earthfall – Mark Walden

Discovery blamed on: Fantasy Book Critic

About the Book

The battle for mankind is about to begin in this riveting story of Earth’s invasion from the author of the H.I.V.E. series.

Sam awakens to see strange vessels gathered in the skies around London. As he stares up, people stream past, walking silently toward the enormous ships, which emit a persistent noise. Only Sam seems immune to the signal. Six months later, he is absolutely alone.

Or so he thinks. Because after he emerges from his underground bunker and is wounded by a flying drone, a hail of machine-gun fire ultimately reveals two very important truths: One, Sam is not, in fact, alone. And two, the drone injury should have killed him—but it didn’t.

With his home planet feeling alien and the future unstable and unclear, Sam must navigate a new world in this gripping adventure.

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Caine’s Law – Matthew Woodring Stover

Discovery blamed on: Nethspace (also, my love of the series)

About the book

SOME LAWS YOU BREAK. SOME BREAK YOU.
AND THEN THERE’S CAINE’S LAW.
 
From the moment Caine first appeared in the pages of Heroes Die, two things were clear. First, that Matthew Stover was one of the most gifted fantasy writers of his generation. And second, that Caine was a hero whose peers go by such names as Conan and Elric. Like them, Caine was something new: a civilized man who embraced savagery, an actor whose life was a lie, a force of destruction so potent that even gods thought twice about crossing him. Now Stover brings back his greatest creation for his most stunning performance yet.

Caine is washed up and hung out to dry, a crippled husk kept isolated and restrained by the studio that exploited him. Now they have dragged him back for one last deal. But Caine has other plans. Those plans take him back to Overworld, the alternate reality where gods are real and magic is the ultimate weapon. There, in a violent odyssey through time and space, Caine will face the demons of his past, find true love, and just possibly destroy the universe.

Hey, it’s a crappy job, but somebody’s got to do it.

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Death Sworn – Leah Cypess

Discovery blamed on: On Starships and Dragonwings

About the Book

When Ileni lost her magic, she lost everything: her place in society, her purpose in life, and the man she had expected to spend her life with. So when the Elders sent her to be magic tutor to a secret sect of assassins, she went willingly, even though the last two tutors had died under mysterious circumstances.

But beneath the assassins’ caves, Ileni will discover a new place and a new purpose… and a new and dangerous love. She will struggle to keep her lost magic a secret while teaching it to her deadly students, and to find out what happened to the two tutors who preceded her. But what she discovers will change not only her future, but the future of her people, the assassins… and possibly the entire world.

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The Sundering – Jacqueline Carey

Discovery blamed on: The Completist

About the Book

If all that is good thinks you evil… are you?

Once upon a time, the Seven Shapers dwelled in accord and Shaped the world to their will. But Satoris, the youngest among them, was deemed too generous in his gifts to the race of Men, and so began the Shapers’ War, which Sundered the world. Now six of the Shapers lay to one end of a vast ocean, and Satoris to the other, reviled by even the race of Men.

Satoris sits in his Darkhaven, surrounded by his allies. Chief among them is Tanaros Blacksword, immortal Commander General of his army. Once a mortal man who was betrayed by King and Wife, Tanaros fled to Darkhaven a thousand years ago, and in Satoris’s service has redeemed his honor-but left his humanity behind.

Now there is a new prophecy that tells of Satoris’s destruction and the redemption of the world. To thwart it, Satoris sends Tanaros to capture the Lady of the Ellylon, the beautiful Cerelinde, to prevent her alliance with the last High King of Men.

But Tanaros discovers that not all of his heart has been lost–his feelings for Cerelinde could doom Satoris, but save the race of Men…

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Hotwire – Simon Ings

Discovery blamed on: John DeNardo over at Kirkus

About the Book

Not a sequel to his first novel Hot Head, but set in the same world and sharing some of the same preoccupations, Simon Ings’ Hotwire asks some interesting questions about how we become human, and how to become human again. Ajay made some bad choices once upon a time–he got his grandfather killed and his sister horribly mutilated; to pay to have her rebuilt, an organ at a time, he has become an all-purpose heavy, first a secret policeman and then an assassin. Rosa has never had any choices–she roams, inconsequentially, the corridors of the space station that is, in a very real sense, her mother, scared of everything she meets and sees. When these two find themselves in improbable alliance, the consequences could be scary, and are highly charged and erotic and at times touching. This is a book about coming to terms with reality, and the very improbability of much of the reality with which the central characters have to come to terms does not lessen the hardness of their choices and our sympathy with them. Full of strongly visualised exotic settings–the slums of Brazil and the interiors of mind human and artificial–this lives up to Ings’ early promise.

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Annihilation – Jeff VanderMeer

Discovery blamed on: Wm Henry Morris

About the Book

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer.

This is the twelfth expedition.

Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them, and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another, that change everything.