State of The ARC – April TBR

The Library at Mount Char
Scott Hawkins

eARC
Release Date: 5/4/2022

About the book:

Originally released June 2016 – Titan Paperback Release April 2022

Carolyn’s not so different from the other people around her. She likes guacamole and cigarettes and steak. She knows how to use a phone. Clothes are a bit tricky, but everyone says nice things about her outfit with the Christmas sweater over the gold bicycle shorts.
After all, she was a normal American herself once.
That was a long time ago, of course. Before she and the others were taken in by the man they called Father. 
In the years since then, Carolyn hasn’t had a chance to get out much. Instead, she and her adopted siblings have studied the books in his Library and learned some of the secrets of his power. And sometimes, they’ve wondered if their cruel tutor might secretly be God.
Now, Father is missing—perhaps even dead—and the Library that holds his secrets stands unguarded. And with it, control over all of creation

Dread Wood
Jennifer Killick

Advanced Finished copy
Release date: 31/3/22
Blog Tour Date : 8/4/2022

About the book:

It’s basically the worst school detention ever. When classmates (but not mate-mates) Hallie, Angelo, Gustav and Naira are forced to come to school on a SATURDAY, they think things can’t get much worse. But they’re wrong. Things are about to get seriously scary.
What has dragged their teacher underground? Why do the creepy caretakers keeping humming the tune to Itsy Bitsy Spider? And what horrors lurk in the shadows, getting stronger and meaner every minute . . .? Cut off from help and in danger each time they touch the ground, the gang’s only hope is to work together. But it’s no coincidence that they’re all there on detention. Someone has been watching and plotting and is out for revenge . . .

Saint Death’s Daughter
C.S.E. Cooney

Saint Death #1

Physical ARC
Release Date: 14/4/22

About the book:

To be born into a family of royal assassins pretty much guarantees that your life is going to be… rather unusual. Especially if, like Miscellaneous “Lanie” Stones, you also have a vicious allergy to all forms of violence and bloodshed, and an uncanny affinity for bringing the dead back to life.
To make matters worse, family debt looms – a debt that will have to be paid sooner rather than later if Lanie and her sister are to retain ownership of the ancestral seat, Stones Manor. Lanie finds herself courted and threatened by powerful parties who would love to use her worryingly intimate relationship with the goddess of death for their own nefarious ends. But the goddess has other plans…

A Catalogue of Catastrophe
Jodi Taylor

Chronicles of St Mary’s #13

Advanced Finished copy
Release date: 14/4/22
Blog Tour: 14/4/22

About the book:

When all is lost. When everything is ending. When there’s no hope. When you can’t win. That’s when you attack.
Punching well above their weight, Max and Markham set out to bring down a sinister organisation whose roots might be firmly embedded in the future but whose focus is the past.
Max’s focus is staying alive long enough to reunite with Leon and Matthew – alternately helped and hindered by St Mary’s. Who aren’t always the blessing they like to think they are.
And that’s not all. Are the effects of constantly leaping around the timeline beginning to make themselves felt? Is Max going mad? Or are the ghosts of the past finally catching up with her?

The Carnival of Ash
Tom Beckerlegge

Physical ARC
Release Date: 15/3/22
Blog Tour starts 25/4/22

About the book:

An extravagant, lyrical fantasy about a city of poets and librarians. A city that never was.
Cadenza is the City of Words, a city run by poets, its skyline dominated by the steepled towers of its libraries, its heart beating to the stamp and thrum of the printing presses in the Printing Quarter.
Carlo Mazzoni, a young wordsmith arrives at the city gates intent on making his name as the bells ring out with the news of the death of the city’s poet-leader. Instead, he finds himself embroiled with the intrigues of a city in turmoil, the looming prospect of war with their rival Venice ever-present. A war that threatens not only to destroy Cadenza but remove it from history altogether…

One foot in the Fade
Luke Arnold

The Fetch Phillips Archives #3

eARC
Release Date UK: 28/4/22

About the book:

In a city that lost its magic, an angel falls in a downtown street. His wings are feathered, whole—undeniably magical—the man clearly flew, because he left one hell of a mess when he plummeted into the sidewalk.
But what sent him up? What brought him down? And will the answers help Fetch bring the magic back for good?Working alongside necromancers, genies, and shadowy secret societies, through the wildest forests and dingiest dive bars, this case will leave its mark on Fetch’s body, his soul, and the fate of the world.

Sea of Tranquility
Emily St John Mandel

eARC
Release Date UK: 28/4/22

About the book:

In 1912, eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew crosses the Atlantic, exiled from English polite society. In British Columbia, he enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and for a split second all is darkness, the notes of a violin echoing unnaturally through the air. The experience shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later Olive Llewelyn, a famous writer, is traveling all over Earth, far away from her home in the second moon colony. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in time, he uncovers a series of lives upended: the exiled son of an aristocrat driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.
Sea of Tranquility is a novel that investigates the idea of parallel worlds and possibilities, that plays with the very line along which time should run. Perceptive and poignant about art, and love, and what we must do to survive, it is incredibly compelling.

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