Calibandar

He's just published the second one in his Shards of the Earth series, one of his most interesting series so far for me. Also interested in Dogs of War and its sequel, and Cage of Souls.

Great review, looking forward to it.

What kind of story is it Ran? What would you say about it outside of what is already known from the rather vague synopsis? More of a larger scale war book, or more about political intrigue/assasinations etc, or something else?

Basically how I felt when reading it. There's nothing anyone is going to do about it, but this is the way it is. He is clearly very much set in his ways and who knows, even if he did try and focus exclusively on Winds, it might not go any faster. He's just not getting it done, is all you can conclude at this point. Its become one of many things he wants to do, he doesnt even give any kind of update on how far along he is, or when it could *conceivably* come out. Which means its not due this year at least, we have to count that out. But similarly also zero idea if it ever will.

Pretty excited for this illustrated Fire and Blood book, high quality color artwork is what I missed in the original release.

Would be so awesome to see a reboot of this.

Great atmospheric cover. Really looking forward to this even though I have a big backlog of Guy Kay books yet to read.

Hmmmm and now book 4 is not on Amazon.com anymore. Its still up on Amazon UK, ISBN 0756418550 Both books are listed at around 800 pages....

On the topic of the covers, this is all very much first world's " problems" I know, if you even wanna call it that, but I took delivery of the Brothers of the Wind DAW hardcover today, was about 32 dollars converted from the EUR price I paid, which is quite a sum for a 255 page book. You'd just think that for that kind of money in this kind of genre you would get that nice Whelan cover, its a real miss that they cancelled him for the last 2 volumes. Maybe someone should do a crowdfunding for this big publisher so that they sign him anyway.

I see that Navigator's Children has now been put up on Amazon with an October release date, just a few months after book 3 ( which doesnt have a synopsis yet). Thats 2 massive books by the looks of it.

I dont think anyone has any answer to that and we will see once the book is listed on Amazon. Which is not the case yet but it can still come out in the second half of the year at this point. Interesting that she released that many chapters already, didnt know that.

Interesting stuff. Gotta start that soon. Its supposedly has the Osanwe Kenta too with some related musings, which I havent read in a long time.

Any other parts that are worthwhile outside of the Numenorean section? The TOC indicates quite a bit of intriguing stuff in various sections.

The latest cover his November release, which I still want to try, was also uninspiring. Bad call.

Has anyone read Nature of Middle Earth yet, whole or in parts?

I mean...possibly. There is certainly a trend. But I think this Nature of Middle Earth book is going to cover a vast amount of unpublished material as it is, certainly it seems that whatever essays left that are worthwhile, apparently all from later years, are covered in it. The German translation is listed at 600 pages, the UK version at 400, so it seems to be a large volume at least.

Words from Hostetter himself: So basically all new work for most of us.

I was very pleasantly surprised by this announcement this week . This sounds awesome. Osanwe Kenta was the one thing that came to mind as a great unpublished piece but its very clear from the description that there is apparently a lot more work that was never published. I knew I always had a feeling that there were various essays that never made it into HoME but it seems it's more than just a few as the book is listed at 400 pages and speaks to " numerous" unpublished works. Besides the Osanwe Kenta is only like 8 pages. There seems to be a lot of stuff on the lands and beasts of Numenor, and that stuff about Elvish incarnation/imoortality is not covered by the Osanwe Kenta I recall so that must be another separate essay. Similarly, Powers of the Valar. It really makes me wonder why this stuff was not included. But then CT even mentioned that something like Beacon Hills of Gondor was not included in People of Middle Earth for space reasons. Whats interesting to me is that it is specifically mentioned that these are all late writings that were not published yet, thats just fascinating. Some more info, this from the press release: In a press release from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Publisher and VP Deb Brody says that the book will cover a range of topics: Then this when the book was announced at Frankfurt book fair 2019:

Two new shows from Netflix that have been really excellent. Transformers War for Cybertron ( when is season 2 out!) and Blood of Zeus.

Phenomenal try by Johnny May

The Del Rey releases on Amazon.com are now up until October and this book is not listed. Nor is it on Gollancz listings for Amazon Uk.

It's from the US publisher.

Got an arc of Brightness Long ago. That's what I call early

Have to say I have the same feeling. I'm not very excited by this synopsis. On top of that, his last couple of books have not been as good as his earlier work. I'm not sure I'd say he's lost it as he is clearly still a superb wordsmith but his plots have become less interesting. His first couple of works are still the best regarded ones as well if you look at ratings on forums etc. I do hope it will be better than the last few.

New novel details are out, it is called "Brightness long ago", comes out in May 2019: