Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/14

Even when other blogging slows (or essentially stops), I keep posting these weekly: listing whatever came in the prior week, sent by hard-working publicists just trying to get some eyeballs and enthusiasm for the books they're pushing that month. Some weeks I have a lot, some weeks I have just a handful.

This week I have one book. (And, still, the general rule applies: I haven't read it yet.)

Pyr has the highest proportion of books I really want to read of any publisher I can think of, probably because Pyr's head, Lou Anders, is one of the few people in the world who loves sword & sorcery more than I do. And if I only got one book this week, I'm really happy to see that it's a new S&S novel from Pyr -- and, even better, that it's from a writer I'm not familiar with.

The Scroll of Years is the first novel by Chris Willrich, who's been selling short fiction (mostly to Magazine of F&SF) for nearly two decades. And it definitely is S&S, being the first novel about the partners (in most of the sense of the word that just sprung to your mind) Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone, a poet/adventurer and near-immortal thief traveling across what looks like an interestingly varied world.

Pyr is publishing this in trade paper on September 24th. I can't promise I'll manage to read it soon, but I want to have already read it, and I'm thrilled to see it. Perhaps you will feel the same.