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The Glove: A Currency of Memory
T.G. Salmastyan’s The Glove: A Currency of Memory is an epic fantasy built around a clever idea: memory is more than something people carry, it’s a force that can be traded, weaponized, inherited, and turned into literal currency. In the Kingdom of Loriena, citizens bring painful memories and emotionally charged objects to the mysterious Glove, which transforms their offerings into gold. At the center of the story is Gevid Tigranak, an inventor, artist, skilled swordsman, and son of a vanished general who has spent much of his life surrounded by other people’s expectations. His connection to Crown Princess Sibylla gives the larger political story a personal center, especially as Prince Varazkhan’s plotting and Captain Bedik’s strange second existence as the pirate king Mad Vandos begin pulling the kingdom toward violence. The novel establishes early that the Glove and its distant Twin are tied to memory, blood, belief, and the fate of the kingdom, and nearly every major character becomes caught in that connection.
What gives the book its personality is Salmastyan’s approach to worldbuilding. Aramus feels less like a conventional fantasy city and more like a place where emotion has leaked into the physical world. Clocks measure longing, bells react to lies, shadows remember old gestures, inventions seem capable of disappointment, and sorrow can become gold. Even military life gets folded into this logic through the zinvors, soldiers who are stripped of their names and identified by numbers, and through Gevid’s Battery of the Unnamed, whose growing loyalty becomes one of the warmer threads in the novel. Salmastyan writes in a deliberately lush, almost dreamlike style, with metaphor piled upon metaphor until the setting itself feels alive. It’s a maximalist kind of fantasy, one that wants you to spend time inside its images. That approach also fits Gevid particularly well because he’s a character who builds things as a way of translating grief into something he can touch, repair, or make fly.
The closest popular comparison for me is Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. Both books create worlds where atmosphere matters as much as plot and where ordinary objects seem to contain private emotional histories. Morgenstern’s circus makes wonder feel tangible through tents, clocks, food, costumes, and performances, while Salmastyan does something similar with coins, mechanical inventions, pomegranates, paintings, weapons, storms, and the Glove itself. Salmastyan’s story is more overtly political and martial, though. The creation of the zinvors, Varazkhan’s conspiracy, Sibylla’s kidnapping, Mad Vandos’s strange relationship with Captain Bedik, and Gevid’s transformation from eccentric inventor into someone willing to fight for the people he loves gradually turn the book into a large-scale adventure. Even then, the emotional logic stays consistent. Power has a memory, grief leaves a material trace, and attempts to control either one create debts that eventually have to be paid. Varazkhan’s rebellion and Bedik’s hunger for power work especially well because both characters believe they’re acting freely while the novel keeps asking how much of anyone’s identity is actually inherited, remembered, or imposed.
By the final chapters, all those ideas come together in storms, sieges, hidden loyalties, pirate battles, and Gevid’s effort to reach Sibylla. The climax works because rescuing her isn’t simply another heroic assignment for him. It’s the point where his memories, his father’s legacy, his inventions, his friendships, and his own choices finally occupy the same moment. His confrontation with Mad Vandos also turns inherited conflict into something physical, as Gevid literally leaves his own mark on the man who has carried his hatred of Rovgat into the next generation. The ending deliberately keeps the larger mystery alive: Gevid reaches Sibylla, but Mad Vandos escapes, and the Glove and its Twin awaken to one another through longing, setting up the next two books in The Covenant of Balance trilogy. That feels right for a novel so interested in the way the past keeps moving inside the present. The Glove: A Currency of Memory is imaginative, strange, emotionally earnest fantasy with a world you can practically smell, hear, and touch, and its strongest idea may be the simplest one beneath all the machinery and magic: what we remember has value because it continues to shape what we become.
The Prince of Treason
The Prince of Treason is a sprawling, blood-soaked political fantasy built around the collapse of one royal house and the dangerous scramble to shape whatever rises in its place. D.S. Eanes opens with a kingdom already burning, then follows the surviving Prince Gabriel, the formidable knight sworn to protect him, the conquering Tanis family, and the rulers watching from the West. The rotating perspectives give the novel the scale of a chronicle while keeping the story grounded in personal hungers: safety, recognition, revenge, love, and the promise of a crown. It’s an ambitious opening to The Dead King series, with enough competing loyalties and unfinished business to sustain a much larger saga.
What makes the book especially compelling is its understanding of power. In Mi’dern, power doesn’t simply belong to whoever has the largest army. It belongs to the person who can control a room, exploit a fear, rewrite a defeat, or persuade others that cruelty is duty. Randall and Byron Tanis are fascinating because their rivalry unfolds through both policy and psychology, while Aaliyah proves just as formidable through perception, patience, and sheer will. One of the novel’s sharpest ideas is that history is often a performance arranged by those desperate to be remembered well, an idea Aaliyah articulates when she challenges the heroic records left by rulers who concealed their private brutality.
Eanes writes action with muscular clarity, whether the scene involves a duel, an ambush, a public execution, or a desperate flight through the wilderness. The violence is graphic and purposeful, establishing a world where bodies are currency and mercy can be interpreted as weakness. Yet the quieter relationships give the story its emotional weight. Robert’s weary guardianship of Gabriel and Konrad, Gabriel’s painful transformation from sheltered prince to survivor, and Aaliyah’s struggle to retain ownership of herself all bring vulnerability to the political machinery. The large cast takes time to assemble, but each storyline gradually reveals its connection to the others, and the shifting viewpoints create a steady sense that separate storms are moving toward the same horizon.
This is ultimately a novel about legacy and the terrifying distance between who people are and how they hope to be remembered. Its kings, princes, warriors, captives, and servants are all fighting for some version of permanence, even when survival demands that they surrender pieces of themselves. The final movement gathers the book’s themes into a series of brutal reversals and leaves its characters transformed, scattered, and poised for an even wider conflict. Eanes has created a harsh, engrossing realm where every oath carries a hidden cost and every victory plants the seed of another betrayal. The Prince of Treason turns the fight for a kingdom into something far more gripping: a fight over who gets to write its history.
Pages: 448 | ASIN: B0H83Y6J3L
Shards of Ember
Mitchell Lecoultre’s Shards of Ember is a sprawling frontier fantasy built around three sisters trying to keep the settlement of Elgion alive. Alexa is a ranger whose patrol ends in tragedy, Sophia is a Keeper who channels magic through fragments of broken gods, and Bella is a stablemaster whose impulsive courage carries her deep into unfamiliar territory. Their separate storylines gradually tighten around an approaching orc invasion, creating a novel that blends wilderness survival, military fantasy, political tension, and divine magic. The map at the beginning reinforces the scale of Lecoultre’s setting, but the book’s real center is the relationship among the sisters.
Alexa’s arc provides much of the novel’s emotional backbone. She begins as a capable but anxious ranger, haunted by the death of her companion and unsure whether she can be trusted with other people’s lives. Her training under Rangemaster Erin gives that insecurity somewhere productive to go, and Erin’s eventual death forces Alexa into leadership before she feels ready. What makes this progression convincing is that Alexa doesn’t suddenly become fearless. She learns to function while afraid, which gives her battlefield decisions more weight. Lecoultre is especially effective when he places her private doubts beside the confidence others begin to place in her. Erin recognizes both Alexa’s talent and the uncertainty that could either strengthen or ruin her, making their mentorship one of the book’s strongest relationships.
Sophia has the most psychologically complicated storyline. Her magical stones aren’t just convenient tools. They’re fragments of damaged gods with their own voices, motives, and rivalries. The Magi Stone heightens Sophia’s intelligence and perception, but its power gradually becomes a craving, allowing the trickster god Dolocius to manipulate her ambition and fear. This gives the magic system a personal cost that reaches beyond physical exhaustion or a limited supply of spells. Sophia’s struggle resembles addiction, spiritual coercion, and the temptation to believe that talent excuses dangerous choices. Her eventual recognition that the stone has been turning her into a piece in a divine conflict is one of the novel’s most satisfying revelations.
Bella brings a rougher, more spontaneous energy to the book. Her recklessness helps create the expedition’s disaster, but it also makes possible the alliance that saves Elgion. After surviving captivity and escaping the orcs, she encounters the saurians, learns to communicate across an enormous cultural divide, and discovers that humanity isn’t alone in the supposedly empty new world. These sections expand the story beyond a simple humans-against-monsters conflict. The saurians have their own fears, histories, and reasons to distrust settlers, while Bella has to earn cooperation with gestures, patience, and shared purpose. Her alliance with Hislock and Toata turns her impulsiveness into something constructive, and their agreement to fight together delivers a strong payoff during the siege.
I think the book’s closest comparison is Brandon Sanderson, particularly the way he combines an accessible ensemble adventure with a magic system tied to divine history. Lecoultre, however, spends more time on frontier routines, food supplies, patrol procedures, animal care, and the practical labor required to keep a settlement functioning. That attention gives Elgion a lived-in quality, though the descriptive passages and repeated internal reflections sometimes slow the momentum. The dialogue can also lean heavily on dialect, but it gives the settlement a distinct social texture. By the final battle, the many strands of the story come together in a way that feels earned: Alexa has become a leader, Sophia confronts the danger inside her own power, and Bella returns with allies no one knew existed. Shards of Ember is an ambitious, sincere fantasy about sisterhood, responsibility, and the difficult process of becoming worthy of the people who depend on you.
Pages: 385 | ASIN: B0DQ2B76XS
Prince Adam’s Quest
Terrence W. Walsh’s Prince Adam’s Quest is a comic fantasy that turns the traditional dragon-slaying adventure into a sustained examination of pride, truth, power, and earned distinction. Prince Adam begins as Leftovria’s celebrated champion, a man whose identity rests on the assurance that he always wins. The opening declaration, “Prince Adam always won,” quickly becomes the premise the story will test through a series of contests, tolls, legal proceedings, and social encounters. Adam sets out to kill a supposedly murderous dragon, accompanied by Minnow, an apprentice bard charged with witnessing and documenting the quest. Their journey gradually reveals that the official account of the dragon’s crimes is unreliable and that Adam’s confidence has been protected by privilege rather than supported by judgment.
The book’s most effective decision is to make Minnow the intellectual and moral center of the adventure. She observes closely, composes songs, negotiates with trolls, insists on professional rules, and recognizes the significance of details Adam dismisses. Her belief that “Words matter. Words have power. There is no Truth with ambiguity” defines both her vocation and the novel’s larger concern with language. Adam uses declarations to impose his version of reality, while Minnow uses questions, evidence, and art to discover what’s true. As the quest progresses, her competence earns respect across cultural boundaries, making her rise from apprentice to Bard of Distinction feel like the natural result of sustained ability.
Walsh builds the fantasy world through playful rules, songs, word histories, guild bylaws, and comic reversals. The bridge trolls are not disposable monsters but members of a developed society with customs, families, occupations, and a strong attachment to proper procedure. King Biter’s court expands that society further, giving the story room to address labor, recognition, gender, prejudice, migration, and political misinformation without abandoning its humorous tone. The narrator frequently addresses the reader, comments on storytelling conventions, and pursues puns or linguistic digressions. This creates the atmosphere of an expansive oral tale, with comedy arising as much from the telling as from the events themselves.
Prince Adam’s Quest is ultimately a satirical story about accountability. Each consequence Adam encounters exposes a different weakness in his self-created legend, while Minnow’s growing authority demonstrates the value of curiosity, preparation, empathy, and precise language. The episodic structure gives the book the energy of a sequence of comic trials, and its recurring rules and verbal motifs bring those episodes together. Beneath the farce, the novel offers a coherent vision of heroism as something established through conduct rather than title, spectacle, or repetition. Its lasting achievement is Minnow, whose artistic skill and commitment to truth transform a prince’s misguided quest into her own persuasive coming-of-age story.
Pages: 168 | ASIN : B0H4MJCLFM
A Red Age
A Red Age by Sage Osterberg and Ulysses Kittilson is a sprawling piece of military science fiction, dystopian fiction, dark fantasy, and dinosaur fiction that treats its dinosaur civilization as a fully developed political and cultural world. The foreword makes that ambition explicit, presenting the novel as an attempt to expand what dinosaur stories can do, and the book follows through with governments, religions, propaganda, ancient histories, military bureaucracies, mass media, technology, class divisions, and generations of resentment. The opening assault on Juliobriga establishes the tone immediately: this is a violent, profane, frequently funny war story in which soldiers joke their way through sewage, gunfire, terrible decisions, and gruesome deaths. From there the story expands into a much larger conflict between the Coalition and the Alliance, with political leaders, soldiers, spies, royals, civilians, and prisoners all getting caught in the same machinery of war.
One of the strongest parts of this dystopian novel is its willingness to let the world feel messy. The Coalition and Alliance each have ideologies, grievances, heroes, monsters, competent people, fools, opportunists, and characters who genuinely believe they’re protecting civilization. Cartassius, in particular, gives the political side of the story some weight. His concern that victory achieved through atrocities will simply plant the seeds of the next war gets at one of the book’s central ideas: civilizations can become trapped inside the stories they tell about their enemies. Zamma approaches the same problem from another direction, questioning the endless cycle of violence while surrounded by a royal culture that treats warfare as inheritance. Meanwhile, characters such as Kuyucak, Thalsos, Botilda, Asgremis, Zorphax, Hassa, Akragos, Izmit, and others broaden the novel into something closer to an ensemble war epic. There’s a lot happening, but that density suits a world where political intrigue, religion, espionage, family loyalty, military ambition, and personal survival are constantly colliding.
The book’s personality comes from how readily it mixes horror with absurdity. Horrific combat can sit beside bureaucratic incompetence, vulgar arguments, terrible advertising, propaganda broadcasts, religious references, and jokes that arrive at the least dignified possible moment. That combination gives this dark sci-fi novel a distinctly satirical streak. Even when the stakes reach an almost apocalyptic scale, everyday stupidity keeps intruding. The effect is especially sharp near the climax, when the Nemesis weapon transforms military victory into catastrophe. A single strike wipes out a fleet and then produces consequences far beyond the triumphant moment its users imagined, turning soldiers from both armies into equally terrified creatures running from the resulting destruction. That sequence captures the novel’s larger view of war beautifully: technology, nationalism, faith, revenge, and ambition can dress violence in grand language, but eventually the violence becomes bigger than everyone who thought they controlled it.
By the end, A Red Age feels like the opening movement of a much larger dinosaur science fiction saga, and its cliffhanger embraces that serialized quality. Kuyucak’s final blood-pit sequence folds together several of the novel’s recurring interests: spectacle, propaganda, captivity, exhaustion, violence as entertainment, and the strange possibility of finding agency inside brutality. That sequence turns the gladiatorial spectacle into something unexpectedly bleak, giving Kuyucak’s storyline a darker emotional edge before the novel closes on a chaotic final note and the promise of Part 2: A Poisoned Sky. It’s a fitting ending for a book that keeps escalating its world while maintaining a rough, conversational sense of humor. Readers drawn to military science fiction, dystopian fantasy, and dinosaur fiction will find a strange and remarkably committed world here, one where prehistoric bodies carry rifles, argue about politics, worship gods, watch trashy entertainment, make catastrophic choices, and inherit the same old problems of power and violence.
Pages: 518 | ASIN : B0FVRXDNJ8
A Gray Cat Showed Up One Saturday
The Great Contagion follows an ancient, sharp-witted cat with a human soul who helps a man confront a deadly sickness sweeping the land. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The idea for The Great Contagion came to me when I was working on Cat Sidhe, another novel in The Merliss Tales series. Cat Sidhe takes place about fifty years after the events in The Great Contagion. I mentioned that the results of a great plague were still visible at the time of Cat Sidhe. After calling attention to this plague numerous times, I decided that I needed to find out what had happened. The result of that exploration was The Great Contagion.
More interesting is the idea for Merliss herself who is based on a real feline. A very thin, sickly, gray cat showed up on our driveway one Saturday and tried to get into our breezeway. We gave it some food and then took it to an emergency vet. The cat had no microchip and was not terminally ill. She was suffering from a respiratory infection, an eye infection, malnutrition, and thousands of fleas. In other words, she needed antibiotics and TLC. A few hundred dollars later, we left the vet with a new cat named Smokey, who was the sweetest lap kitty you can imagine. We never knew how old Smokey was, possibly pushing twenty. She spent her last two and a half years being spoiled by us. Thanks to Smokey, I felt inspired with the idea for an ancient gray cat in a fantasy setting.
What drew you to writing a fantasy centered on healing rather than conquest or warfare?
Many fantasy stories centered on conquest and warfare focus on protagonists occupying the upper strata of society. If you want your characters to directly influence events and you’re dealing with politics and warfare, the characters will need to be in positions of power. I wanted to write stories about characters outside the circles of political and military power and show them dealing with events outside their control, struggling to have an impact on their environment. The healing arts are one area in which a relatively low-status character can impact many others, including high-status characters. Healers also travel through villages and the countryside as part of their work.
How do you build tension in a story that unfolds at a measured pace?
The Great Contagion is composed of numerous subplots that interact and conflict. Some of the subplots center on conflicts and problems related to the people. Others revolve around Merliss, the old gods, and other magical creatures. There is also a subplot involving Merliss and the local cat population. All the subplots are tied together by the contagion, and Merliss is a witness to all the events described. I build tension by staggering high points from the various subplots and planting seeds to set the stage for later scenes of intense action. The level of action increases throughout the book.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
The next book in The Merliss Tales series is The Forging of Merliss. The origin tale, this novel is set thousands of years in the past and will tell how Merliss’s spirit came to occupy the body of a cat. I hope to release this book by spring 2027.
Author Links: GoodReads | BlueSky | Website
Merliss is no ordinary cat. She’s a young girl’s spirit trapped in a cat’s body. While the magic that banished her has snatched away her ability to speak to humans, it has given her a life spanning millennia. For centuries she has lived with the cunning folk, assisting their efforts to heal the sick and ward off malevolent creatures. Now a bleeding sickness has thrown the medieval community into chaos.
The cunning man Hailaird and his apprentice Fendrel are in danger from the disease. The life Merliss has worked so long to build is in jeopardy. Before she entered the cat, she had trained to be a shaman. Do her centuries of experience hold a secret to a cure? But disease isn’t her only nemesis.
A pair of malevolent creatures have crossed the moor into the forest, threatening more havoc. With disease and monsters ravaging the land, Merliss is hard-pressed to survive. It couldn’t be worse, until a mob looking for a scapegoat turns its wrath on Merliss. Tooth and claw and magic may not be enough.
The Throne of Deep Roots: Book 2 of The Command of the Worldhold Series
The Throne of Deep Roots, the second book in Morven T. H. Borthwick’s The Command of the Worldhold series, is a sweeping work of dark epic fantasy built around ancient powers, political betrayal, war, and the consequences of choices made under pressure. The story begins in the shadow of a supernatural disaster, when the Black Sea rose as though answering an unseen will. From there, the novel follows several connected conflicts involving Eron, Belor, Seth, Elia, and the rulers of Dovaryel and Yorthmere. At the center of everything is The Command, a tiny stone with the power to make the sea obey, whose awakening attracts forces far older and more dangerous than the people carrying it fully understand.
One of the book’s strongest qualities is the depth of its world. Dovaryel, Dravarûyn, the Kor lands, and the southern mountains each have their own histories, customs, political tensions, and supernatural traditions. Borthwick doesn’t treat the setting as decoration. The world’s old wars and buried grudges actively shape what the characters believe and how they respond to one another. Titles such as Boundhand, Rootmaker, Vowblade, and Orathë also carry real social and spiritual weight. This gives the story the feeling of a history that began long before the first page. The formal, almost legendary prose suits that approach, especially in scenes involving prophecy, ritual, and ancient beings.
The characters are most compelling when they’re forced to decide what responsibility means. Belor’s Binding Art makes him powerful, but his real strength comes from his understanding that guilt can extend beyond the person who performs an act. His warning that “The blood of the fallen does not name the hand alone, but the will that sent it” captures one of the novel’s central concerns. Commands, bargains, and political decisions leave marks on everyone involved. Seth’s escape from execution, her discovery that she’s carrying Sathor’s son, and her refusal to return to the people who condemned her give her storyline a sharp emotional edge. Elia’s struggle to lead while dealing with fear, pride, and the limits of her gift makes her feel human even when the events around her reach a mythic scale.
The novel’s pacing is deliberate and immersive. Conversations, councils, journeys, and preparations for war receive nearly as much attention as battles, allowing tension to build gradually across the book. When violence arrives, particularly around the Field of Dravarûyn, it feels like the result of decisions that have been accumulating for hundreds of pages. The large cast and extensive terminology ask the reader to pay close attention, but the appendix provides useful support for navigating the Worldhold. The descriptions are often rich and solemn, creating an atmosphere in which forests, rain, stone chambers, and mountain caves seem to remember the events that happened within them.
By the end, The Throne of Deep Roots has expanded from a struggle among rulers into a confrontation with powers that reach back into the foundations of the world. Eron’s bond with The Command, the pursuit of the Thavurwyns, and the revelations beside the Deep Mirror all point toward a threat larger than the characters first imagined. Belor’s observation that “The ancient powers, once awakened, are not easily returned to sleep” works as both a warning and a summary of the book’s direction. This is a substantial, lore-heavy fantasy novel for readers who enjoy layered histories, morally complicated alliances, supernatural dread, and stories in which every victory creates a new burden. Its ending closes the immediate journey while leaving a chilling question hanging over the series: whether Vaelthar’s prison is beginning to fail.
Pages: 402 | ASIN: B0H45RJZR7
What If You Could Start Over?
One Chance follows a middle-aged man haunted by the consequences of his own choices who is offered an unexpected way out through a doorway leading him into a world of giants, witches, and enchanted objects. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
I think it started with the idea that if I could live my life over again, would I do anything differently? I think most people have that thought from time to time, and the main character exemplifies an extreme of that. It’s not just that he would change one thing or another, but that he would change the person he was. From there, the book explores ideas around why people make the decisions they make and ultimately become who they are as people. Finally, can we change and start over, or are we trapped by our place and circumstances? The challenges and obstacles he faces in the story, although pure fantasy, in many ways can be related to the challenges we face in everyday life.
Why did you choose a middle-aged protagonist instead of the younger heroes often found in portal fantasy?
One of the main issues for the character was a life filled with regrets. He had regrets about decisions he had made, possible life paths that he had not taken, and even regrets around the very person he had become. Those character issues fit much better with an older character with a lifetime of mistakes rather than someone younger. As he goes through the portal, he becomes young again, a change that is far better appreciated for an older character. I think the theme of starting over and becoming someone new wouldn’t have made as much sense with a young protagonist.
How long did it take to build the world of Wisteria before you began drafting the novel?
I actually started by developing the characters in the story and an overall theme. After that, I developed the general storyline and the first couple of chapters. The bulk of the world-building happened as I was writing the story. I wrote the storyline I had outlined and essentially built the world around it as I wrote. So I really didn’t start building the world until after I began drafting the novel.
What do you hope readers discover about themselves while following Chance’s journey?
In the story, Chance faces a lot of obstacles to becoming the person he wanted to be. Of course, the outward things included traps, monsters, and villains threatening him, but the greater obstacles came from within himself. He faced selfish temptations, old habits, personal vanity, and good old-fashioned fear. I hope readers would recognize that those same challenges exist in our own world, in different forms, but the greater barriers to growth and success are the ones we create ourselves. He’s only truly able to acknowledge those personal challenges and move forward when he fully lays down his own desires in order to become the person his friends needed him to be.
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What he finds there is a world in crisis, with danger around every corner. He meets two friends who each have a unique power, and together they’re given a quest to save everyone from impending destruction. They will have to overcome monsters and villains as they are pursued by a legendary bounty hunter. Can Charlie and his friends overcome dragons, giants, and magic spells to save mankind? Can he overcome old habits and become the person that he’s always aspired to be?
