TWO THINGS:


The Fall of the Dagger, the third and last book of The Forsaken Lands trilogy, now has a set publication date: 19th April 2016 (USA) and 21st April 2016 (UK). 


And the MIRAGE MAKERS trilogy is now available in ebook form in the USA, all three books. Start with the first: THE HEART OF THE MIRAGE.

Sort of. The Heart of the Mirage is on the list* of 2008 bestsellers at Fantastic Planet Bookshop in Perth.

Interestingly enough, the vast majority of books ahead of me on that list are science fiction, not fantasy.

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*UPDATE: Just where on the list seems to bounce all over the place. Currently on number 22.

…they really do. And they are selling on the international scene thick and fast. Here’s another returning to the wider world after a break. She’s a lovely lady who has managed to write and do all kinds of fabulous things with her life while raising an enormous family (6 kids in 10 years. Yikes! I’d be prostrate…) and looking good enough to model for Vogue, all at the same time.

From the info in the press release:

Rowena Cory Daniells now has a three-book deal with Solaris, the mainstream genre imprint of BL Publishing. The series is entitled King Rolen’s Kin and the first book, provisionally called BYREN’S BANE, is due for publication in early 2010.

“The books follow the lives of three of King Rolen’s heirs, when their kingdom, Rolencia, is invaded by their ancestral enemy, Merofynia. A sweeping fantasy adventure, the narrative explores the eternal questions of ambition, trust and betrayal.“

Over the years Rowena has run a bookshop, a graphic art studio, illustrated children’s books, sold nearly 30 children’s books and a fantasy trilogy (The Last T’En) internationally, established R&D Studios and served on the management committees of state and national arts organisations. She lives by the bay in Brisbane with her husband and children, and has a Masters in Arts*(Research).

Rowena Cory Daniells, congratulations!

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* My book, Heart of the Mirage, was one of the case studies for her master’s thesis, along with Ursula K. le Guin’s Earthsea and Rowena’s own The T’en Exiles

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Here’s part of it:

Glenda Larke has written a very enjoyable and utterly compelling story that unflinchingly probes into the psychology of a person who has been robbed of her family, her people and her culture. Ligea’s origins have been stolen from her; her heritage has been denied her – a crime that is compounded by the fact that she has been raised by the very person who has killed her family. Larke has obviously been inspired by real events, mainly the Disappeared Ones of Argentina and the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal Australia, a fact that imbues Ligea’s story with a deep-felt resonance.

Characterization constitutes the novel’s greatest strength. It is Ligea’s character that drives the plot and Larke takes the time necessary to build up Ligea’s personality as well as the events and experiences that prompt her to question herself and her values, thus making the manner in which her character evolves plausible. When it comes to characterization, Larke’s work reminds me very much of Robin Hobb. Like Hobb, Larke uses a first-person narrative and she takes the time necessary to build a quite complex character. And like Hobb, Larke is never shies away from revealing bare the less savoury aspects of the protagonist’s personality. Ligea is in many ways not very likeable. Throughout a large part of the story, she comes across as arrogant, self-centered and cruel, but as Larke slowly reveals the forces that have shaped her one can’t help to feel for her. Likewise, the experiences that cause her to change and mature as a person ring absolutely true.

Heart of the Mirage is a very strong novel that offers a multi-facetted and deeply flawed protagonist as well as a well-paced and deeply compelling story about betrayal and identity. Larke has a fluid prose that often emphasizes sensuous detail and if she sometimes veers towards the overly descriptive then this is a very minor complaint.

Many thanks to Trine D.Paulsen

Jennifer Fallon has pointed out that Harper Collins Australia website now has the”browse inside the book” facility. You can now take a peek inside each of the Mirage Maker titles here by clicking on the title of each book. Be warned though, the pages they offer you are not entirely consecutive – they are the first 3 pages of each chapter! Enough, I guess, for you to decide whether you will like the story. One thing for sure, there are a lot more pages there than you get with Amazon.

They have not done the same thing yet for the Isles of Glory, although you can read extracts of The Aware and The Tainted.

*Well, in Fantastic Planet since they opened shop in 2005….

This sf/f bookstore in my hometown (Perth, Australia) has just published a list of their top 100 bestsellers. And there is Heart of the Mirage at number 74. You can see the whole list here, but before you look, see if you can guess any of the top ten and let us know in the comments section! Two of the ten are Australian authors.

71…Where’s My Cow?, by Terry Pratchett
72…Iron Council, by China Mieville
73…Blue Dragon, by Kylie Chan
74…Heart of the Mirage, by Glenda Larke
75…The Rabbits, by Shaun Tan and John Marsden
76…Chasm City, by Alastair Reynolds
77…Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson
78…Geodesica Descent, by Sean Williams
79…The Android’s Dream, by John Scalzi
80…Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card

This from The Star newspaper today (paraphrased!):

Antonio Azic has been arrested in Argentina. Why? Because he adopted a baby, now a woman named Laura and about the same age as Ligea was at the beginning of Heart of the Mirage. Laura, you see, was born in a secret prison.

Her parents (Silvia Dameri and Orlando Ruiz) were kidnapped prior to her birth, imprisoned then murdered; their elder two small children were dumped at orphanages without their identities and adopted elsewhere. Their kidnappers were military men serving a military junta who routinely slaughtered people who questioned their ruthless regime. (Throwing them out of aircraft over the sea was a favoured mode of killing.)

Laura was – presumably – raised to believe the right-wing junta were the heroes of Argentina, and those horrible lefties were actually dreadful communists about to plunge the country into anarchy.

She refused to cooperate when a group of grandmothers pressed for DNA testing. But the testing went ahead, and her true identity is now revealed. Her young parents died for their ideals, her siblings were torn from one another – and now she, aged 27, has to sort out what she believes, and just who – if any – are the good guys here.

Does it all sound familiar? I wrote Heart of the Mirage for Laura Luis Dameri, and all the others like her from around the world. And for their parents and those indomitable women, the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.

If you live downunder, Feist’s “Wrath of a Mad God” is just released. If you drop into a Dymock’s bookshop, you should be able to get a real bargain – it is being wrapped together with “Heart of the Mirage“, at – I think – a two-for-the-price-of-one bargain.

So how about it? Go on, make me happy…and then make me happier still by buying the other two books in The Mirage Makers trilogy: The Shadow of Tyr and Song of the Shiver Barrens.

I don’t think you’ll regret it, honest.

I listened to the entire “Sorry” speech by Prime Minister Rudd of Australia over on Justine Larbalestier’s blog and shed a tear. So many bad things are done in the name of governments – even in the name of doing good, that every now and then it is great to hear an apology for one of these policies. No one can make it right for anyone, even if they are still alive. But saying sorry is the correct thing to do. It’s a start.

Back in 1964 while all this was still going on — that is, forcibly taking children away from their indigenous parents and communities, literally dragging them out of their mother’s arms in some cases, simply on the racist basis of them having some white blood, then carting them off to mission schools where the level of care and education was patchy and their religious denomination was decided by chance — back then, I was in university taking a course in elementary anthropology. The course included a unit on the culture of the indigenous peoples of Australia. It was all pretty basic.

I knew children were being taken, even then, to mission schools for education. In my humungous naivety, I assumed their parents had consented and that the children returned home for holidays. I assumed they could write letters to their families. I assumed that this was the best way for them to get an education and therefore to have a choice in their future lives. What did I know – I assumed all this, because the people who surrounded me in my youth were reasonable rational and kind and would never have treated me in any other way.

It never occurred to me that not only was permission not granted, but that these children were quite literally being stolen, and that the paper trail was obscured by name changes or obliterated, or perhaps never existed in the first place, so that when children and parents tried to find one another as adults, it was never easy and sometimes impossible.

To this day I wonder about those professors and tutors I had at university – they must have known. They did field research, after all. Why did they not tell us just how iniquitous the system was?

When I found out, I was outraged, but by then I was already living in Malaysia. And that was when I started to wonder what I could do to say sorry. Not much, really. When the previous Australian government refused to say sorry, I was furious.

And of that outrage, of that fury, one of the elements in Heart of the Mirage was born – and I wrote a fantasy novel about a woman stolen from her people and raised to despise her own culture.

The acknowledgments in the book say, in part:

Many years ago, when my own children were very young, I heard for the first time two stories, from opposite sides of the globe. One told the tragedy of (…) how several generations of children were forcibly taken from their loving, caring families to be raised by strangers. They were told to forget who they had been and where they had come from, to forget their language, their culture and their people; indeed to denigrate their very origins.

Ligea’s story is my way of saying sorry to all those mothers and their children; my way of paying homage to (…) the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal Australia. As a mother, I have wept for you.

After the book was published, the best fanmail I have ever had came from a Koori woman living in Western Australia, to say thank you. I cried then too.

There is so little one can do to repair the past.