Sarah Monette Knihy

In The Grief of Stones, Katherine Addison returns to the world of The Goblin Emperor with a direct sequel to The Witness For The Dead... Celehar's life as the Witness for the Dead of Amalo grows less isolated as his circle of friends grows larger. He has been given an apprentice to teach, and he has stumbled over a scandal of the city--the foundling girls. Orphans with no family to claim them and no funds to buy an apprenticeship. Foundling boys go to the Prelacies; foundling girls are sold into service, or worse. At once touching and shattering, Celehar's witnessing for one of these girls will lead him into the depths of his own losses. The love of his friends will lead him out again.

"Quests from the Infinite Staircase embraces the magic of the most beloved Dungeons & Dragons adventures of all time, updated for the game's fifth edition"--

Mélusine — a city of secrets and lies, pleasure and pain, magic and corruption — and destinies lost and found. Felix Harrowgate is a dashing, highly respected wizard. But his aristocratic peers don't know his dark past — how his abusive former master enslaved him, body and soul, and trained him to pass as a nobleman. Within the walls of the Mirador — Melusine's citadel of power and wizardry — Felix believed he was safe. He was wrong. Now, the horrors of his previous life have found him and threaten to destroy all he has since become. Mildmay the Fox is used to being hunted. Raised as a kept-thief and trained as an assassin, he escaped his Keeper long ago and lives on his own as a cat burglar. But now he has been caught by a mysterious foreign wizard using a powerful calling charm. And yet the wizard was looking not for Mildmay — but for Felix Harrowgate. Thrown together by fate, the broken wizard Felix and the wanted killer Mildmay journey far from Melusine through lands thick with strange magics and terrible demons of darkness. But it is the shocking secret from their pasts, linking them inexorably together, that will either save them, or destroy them.

De două decenii, an de an, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror constituie un standard de calitate al literaturii fantastice. Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link și Gavin Grant duc mai departe această tradiție în volumul de față. Rezultată în urma unei cartografii exhaustive a tărâmului ficțiunii literare, această colecție reunește peste patruzeci de poezii și nuvele, de la povestiri pentru copii până la horror gotic, de la realism magic până la povești întunecate în stilul Grand Guignol. Veteranilor genului li se alătură vocile tinere cele mai curajoase, într-un regal al ficțiunii literare contemporane.