Worldbuilding in fantasy and science fiction is a huge part of the genre. Every book or series introduces a reader to a new set of rules, such as, dragons exist in this world, or some people are born with magical powers. The mundane details are just as important as the fantastic ones. Is this… Read More

Read an exclusive bonus prologue scene to the bestselling The City of Brass, the first book in the spellbinding Daevabad Trilogy, out now in paperback. The second book in the series, The Kingdom of Copper, has just been released in hardback.   Muntadhir “Dhiru.” A hand shook his shoulder. Read More

Memories can play tricks on us, fading and twisting over time and sometimes even changing altogether. How, then, can they form the basis of a magic system? That was the question I faced in developing The Machinery Trilogy. Without giving too much away, memories sit at the heart of the… Read More

  So you’re planning a trip to the World Cried. Excellent choice of destination. It could certainly use the tourism, as things have been a little… stifled since the Great Drought. Here’s a list of the top ten things you need to pack, know, and see in order to have… Read More

When I sat down to write Kingdom of Souls many years ago, I was terrified. Growing up, I desperately searched for characters in books who looked like me and was always disappointed to find none. I loved reading stories where kids saved the world, tamed dragons, wielded magic, flew… Read More

November is nearly over, which means NaNoWriMo is also coming to an end – well, the writing part, at least. Anyone who has ever participated in this annual phenomenon will know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, here it is in a nutshell: NaNoWriMo presents you with the… Read More

There’s a lot that goes into worldbuilding – geography, magic, culture…. But one thing looms over all of this: politics. The extent to which this is true depends very much on the book in question. In my books – the well-reviewed and very reasonably priced The Machinery Trilogy – politics… Read More

Suppose you were born with a magical ability, but the ability was so intrinsic to who you were that you were unaware of how unusual it was. Just as a child doesn’t know what a miracle it is to be able to see colours, or distinguish the different scents of… Read More

From the very beginning, The Wolves of Llisé has been about truth. On my website, www.amongwolves.net there is a quotation by Mark Twain that I love: “The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.” It’s an old refrain but most would agree that history… Read More

Five years ago I sat down and started writing a scene of violence. Men in the desert. Heat. Sunlight. Battle. A hero with a terrible flaw in him. A story emerged, fully formed, pouring itself out of me, a whole world and its history there in my head, love and… Read More

Ahead of the paperback coming out next month we have a thrilling extract from Francesca Haig’s The Forever Ship – the final instalment in the enthralling Fire Sermon Trilogy…   PROLOGUE And so it did end in fire, after all: the flame bursting from its white centre. The blast opening… Read More

COLDMAKER came out of two burning desires (pun intended). First and foremost, I very much wanted to explore a societal structure where the currency had a high inherent value, instead of just an assumed value. Basically I wanted to explore the barter system on steroids. I wanted the reader to… Read More

If you’ve read book 1 (aka The Deathless) then you’ll know what to expect: lurking demons, floating castles, immortals reincarnating into the bodies of their descendants, magical winged power armour, and the occasional five-legged dog. There are lots of different inspirations for the series, from Avatar: The Legend of… Read More

On 5 September 2019, the third book in my Godblind Trilogy will be published. Godblind, Darksoul and Bloodchild chart the story of an epic, world-changing and god-killing war of conquest and religious zealotry, not just between the neighbouring kingdoms of Rilpor and Mireces, but between the Gods… Read More