Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Fantasy

Princess Pasiphae of Kolchis is sent to Knossos to secure the throne, but she soon finds herself entangled in a brutal power struggle. As the Mother cult demands blood and Minos seeks to overturn ancient rule, she fights to protect her children; Asterion, her gentle son marked as a monster, and Ariadne, the ambitious daughter who rejects her.

A devastating, five-timeline tale centred on a community first invigorated, then devastated by the coal mining industry in the most original folk horror novel of the year.

Fortune Blyth suffered the loss of a secret child when she was 16 and vowed never to let another man touch her. Ten years later, she is content with her beloved birds. But when witch hunters come to town, it isn’t long before fingers are pointed at the spinster and she is forced to choose; stay and hang, or marry a man who can offer her safety far from home.

981 AD. The Viking King of Dublin is dead. His young widow, Gormflaith, has ambitions for her son – and herself – but Ireland is a dangerous place and kings tend not to stay kings for long. Gormflaith also has a secret. She is one of the Fomorians, an immortal race who can do fire-magic. She has kept her powers hidden at all costs, for there are other immortals in this world – like the Tuatha DE Danann, a race of warriors who are sworn to kill Fomorians.

City-by-city, kingdom-by-kingdom, the Palleseen have sworn to bring Perfection and Correctness to an imperfect world. As their legions scour the world of superstition with the bright flame of reason, so they deliver a mountain of ragged, holed and scorched flesh to the field hospital tents just behind the frontline. Which is where Yasnic, one-time priest, healer and rebel, finds himself. Reprieved from the gallows and sent to war clutching a box of orphan Gods, he has been sequestered to a particularity unorthodox medical unit.

England, 1979. Vincent, Lawrence and William are the last remaining residents of a secluded New Forest home, part of the government's Sycamore Scheme. Every day, the triplets do their chores, play their games and take their medicine, under the watchful eyes of three mothers: Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night.

Deep in the forest lives Mehrab the witch, coping with loneliness in her own strange ways and quietly battling her demons. One evening, a young woman appears on her doorstep seeking shelter, pursued by godhounds who wish to destroy all those practising magic, and Mehrab’s solitary existence is disrupted as she teaches the girl how to control her powers. Together they forge a cure for their isolation with heartbreaking consequences....

Neva Friezland is born into a world of trickery and illusion, where fortunes can be won and lost on the turn of a card. She is also born with an extraordinary gift. She can predict the weather. In Regency England, where the proper goal for a gentlewoman is marriage and only God knows the weather this is dangerous. It is also potentially very lucrative.

Orphaned as a young child, Mirin O'Malley has been brought up by her grandparents on their isolated, rambling estate Hob's Hallow. Long ago her family prospered due to a deal struck with the mer, the terrifying creatures who live in the depths of the sea: safety for their merchant ships in return for a child of each generation. But for many years the family have been unable to keep their side of the bargain and their fortunes have suffered as a result. When Mirin's grandfather dies, her grandmother puts in train a plan to restore their glory - but at the price of Mirin's freedom.

Four friends have a pact: to meet up on the same day every year in their small hometown in southern Italy. Art, the charismatic leader of the group, has always been adamant about the pact. But this year, he doesn't show up. Searching for him, the friends make a worrying discovery: Art has been farming marijuana, a very dangerous activity in mafia-controlled country.

The first book in a new environmental epic fantasy series set in a world where ships kept afloat by magical hearthfires sail an endless grass sea. On the never-ending, miles-high expanse of prairie grasses known as the Forever Sea, Kindred Greyreach, hearthfire keeper and sailor aboard harvesting vessel The Errant, is just beginning to fit in with the crew of her new ship when she receives devastating news. Her grandmother--The Marchess, legendary captain and hearthfire keeper--has stepped from her vessel and disappeared into the sea.

When young Emily Brontë helps a wounded man she finds at the foot of an ancient pagan shrine in the remote Yorkshire moors, her life becomes contentiously entwined with his. He is Alcuin Curzon, embittered member of a sect working to eradicate the resurgent plague of lycanthropy in Europe and northern England. But Emily's father, curate of the Haworth village church, is responsible for having unwittingly brought a demonic werewolf god to Yorkshire forty years ago—and it is taking possession of Emily's beloved but foolish and dissolute brother.

Below Covent Garden lies the Untermarkt, where anything and everything has a price: a lover's first blush, a month of honesty, a wisp of fortune. As a child, Deri was sold to one of the Market's most powerful merchants. Now, after years of watchful servitude, Deri finally spots a chance to buy not only his freedom but also his place amongst the Market's elite when he stumbles into the path of a runaway princess desperate to sell her royal destiny. But news of the missing princess and her wayward destiny spreads.

Brian, an aimless slacker, works doubles at his shift job, forgets to clean his room and lays about with his friends Nik and Darby. He's been struggling to manage his transition to adulthood almost as much as his monthly transitions to a werewolf. Really, he is not great at the whole werewolf thing, and his recent murderous slip-ups have caught the attention of Tyler, a Millennial were-mentor determined to take the mythological world by storm.

Ireland, 1000 AD. Gormflaith is unhappily married to Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, and although a queen she struggles with her limited position. As an immortal Fomorian with the secret gift of magic, Gormflaith has a burning desire: to find and destroy the hidden fortress of her sworn enemies, the Descendants, who seek to kill her kind at all costs. She begins to use her magical powers, and discovers she is more skilled than she ever realised... but can she control what she will become?

Across the ruins of Ferron, the rotstorm ever rages. From its nightmarish depths, demons and goblins and rust-folk have struck forth and claimed the Northern Marches as their sanctuary. Through the Undal Protectorate, the land is gripped in a Claw Winter, a frozen mirror of the punishment laid down to the west. Abandoned on the island of Riven, Floré and her comrades must find their way back to the Protectorate. Floré's daughter Marta is hidden somewhere in the north, dying from the skein-magic she cannot yet control. And now, a centuries-old problem threatens to cause new problems for Floré.

1996—Luca Saracino is thirteen and has been completely blind for eight months when his parents move to a Southern Italian farmhouse they dream of turning into a hotel. With his brother dropping out of university and the family reeling from Luca's diagnosis, they are chasing dreams of rebirth and reinvention.

Once a warrior of the Stormguard Commandos, Floré wrought horrors in the rotstorm to protect her people. She did her duty and swore to leave the bloodshed behind. But when her daughter, Marta, was kidnapped, Floré was forced to once again raise her gauntlet against the devils of Ferron to bring her home. Now Marta is dying from the skein-magic she inherited from her father, and the Protectorate is weakened by the absence of the whitestaffs. The mystical order of healers and sages fled to their island citadel of Riven when strange orbs cut through the night.

After setting fire to the Forever Sea and leaving the surface world behind, Kindred Greyreach dives below to find a Seafloor populated by roving bands of scavengers. Among them, Kindred discovers a familiar face working to save the Sea from the continued spread of the Greys and the ravages of the world above. But when Kindred finds herself at odds with them, she and her friends will have to use every power available to them—including their link to the surface world—to forestall disaster.

Simone is one of the Glitterati, the elite living lives of luxury and leisure. Slave to the ever-changing tides—and brutal judgements—of fashion, he is immaculate. To be anything else is to be unfashionable, and no one wants to be unfashionable, or even worse, ugly. When Simone accidentally starts a new fashion with a nosebleed at a party, another Glitterati takes the credit. Soon their rivalry threatens to raze their opulent utopia to the ground, as no one knows how to be vicious like the beautiful ones.