Saturday, March 29, 2014

Garth Nix Does It Again: CLARIEL


If you have not read the Abhorsen Trilogy you are truly missing out in reading life.

Pre-Order:
Barnes and Noble: BN.COM
Amazon: Here

Author Garth Nix has created the Old Kingdom Chronicles Over the years:

Sabriel
Lireal
Abhorsen

and through the series we have seen triumph and despair over and over again, richly woven into these characters who are struggling with not only themselves but also their world. Through fabulous world building and dynamic characters readers are entwined in this story and are fascinating in every direction that Garth Nix takes us.

With the upcoming release of Clariel we get a prequel some 600 years before Sabriel and find out how all of this magic went down.


Blurb From the Publisher:

Clariel is the daughter of the one of the most notable families in the Old Kingdom, with blood relations to the Abhorsen and, most importantly, to the King. When her family moves to the city of Belisaere, there are rumors that her mother is next in line for the throne. However, Clariel wants no part of it—a natural hunter, all she ever thinks about is escaping the city’s confining walls and journeying back to the quiet, green world of the Great Forest.

But many forces conspire against Clariel’s dream. A dangerous Free Magic creature is loose in the city, her parents want to marry her off to a killer, and there is a plot brewing against the old and withdrawn King Orrikan. When Clariel is drawn into the efforts to find and capture the creature, she discovers hidden sorcery within herself, yet it is magic that carries great dangers. Can she rise above the temptation of power, escape the unwanted marriage, and save the King?

Blurb From the Author: (From Inside A Dog)

CLARIEL is my next YA novel, returning to the Old Kingdom. It takes places about six hundred years before the events of SABRIEL, and is the story of a goldsmith's daughter who also happens to be the grand-daughter of The Abhorsen. Caught up against her will in the internal politics of the Kingdom, she finds herself drawn to forbidden magics . . .
The release date of the book has just been set. It is September 2014 and will almost certainly be simultaneous in the USA, Australia/NZ and the UK from my various publishers. Translations will follow more slowly, I expect.
Here are the first couple of paragraphs from the Prologue and Chapter One, respectively. (They may change slightly or even a lot, as I am still revising and responding to the editorial process.)


Prologue

Old Marral the fisherman lived in one of the oddest parts of Belisaere, the ancient capital of the Old Kingdom. A proud city with high walls to defend against living foes, and rushing aqueducts to keep out the Dead, one tiny corner of the great metropolis lay outside the protection of both wall and water.

Known to all simply as The Islet, it was a rocky island just beyond the city’s south-east sea tower. Joined to the mainland by a rough stone causeway save at the highest tides, the island was inhabited by the poorest of the poor, the fisher-folk who had lost their boats, or drank too much, or had suffered some calamity that kept them from the city’s more prosperous fishing harbour further to the north.

Chapter One

The house was one of the best in Belisaere, high on the eastern slope of Beshill. It boasted five floors, each with a broad balcony facing east, and on top there was a pleasant roof garden. This delivered a view over the lesser houses on the slope below, and past them across the red roofs of the buildings that clustered closely on the valley floor on either side of the Winter Road. Beyond the houses was the seven-tiered Great Eastern Aqueduct and its lesser companion, the city wall, its feet almost in the water. Beyond it lay the glittering expanse of the Sea of Saere, now dotted with those slower, straggling fishing boats that were coming late to Fish Harbor, hours after the rest of the fleet had returned to unload their catch with the dawn.
Clariel stood at the intricately carved marble railing on the edge of the roof garden, with the sun on her face and the cool sea breeze ruffling her shorn-at-the-neck jet-black hair, and wondered why she couldn’t like the view, the house, or indeed, the whole city of Belisaere.



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