Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted over at Wishful Endings to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about but haven’t yet read. Most of the time they’re books that have yet to be released, but not always. It’s based on the Waiting on Wednesday meme, which was originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine.
This week my Can’t-Wait-For Book is Asunder by Kerstin Hall!
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy
Representation: Secondary F/F
Published on: 20th August 2024
Goodreads
"Eerie, lovely, and surreal."—Ann Leckie on The Border Keeper
We choose our own gods here.
Karys Eska is a deathspeaker, locked into an irrevocable compact with Sabaster, a terrifying eldritch entity—three-faced, hundred-winged, unforgiving—who has granted her the ability to communicate with the newly departed. She pays the rent by using her abilities to investigate suspicious deaths around the troubled city she calls home. When a job goes sideways and connects her to a dying stranger with dangerous secrets, her entire world is upended.
Ferain is willing to pay a ludicrous sum of money for her help. To save him, Karys inadvertently binds him to her shadow, an act that may doom them both. If they want to survive, they will need to learn to trust one another. Together, they journey to the heart of a faded empire, all the while haunted by arcane horrors and the unquiet ghosts of their pasts.
And all too soon, Karys knows her debts will come due.
Listen. LISTEN. I have read this book. I have been that fortunate. And my friends, you are NOT READY.
(I’m not ready and I’ve read it once already, so imagine how completely unprepared YOU are!)
I don’t usually feature books I’ve already read in these Can’t Wait posts, but Asunder is out next week, and maybe you haven’t heard about it, and my friends, I cannot allow that state of affairs to continue! I must ensure you hear about this book!!!
Maybe you’ve read some of Hall’s earlier books. Maybe you haven’t. It doesn’t really matter, because Asunder outshines ALL OF THEM, so even if you think you know what Hall is capable of: no, you don’t. I promise.
Now: picture a world that doesn’t at all map onto ours, one whose geopolitical history has been shaped by not-gods. Their miracles fill the roles of public transport and the post and a whole bunch of other things; their creations, living and not, are scattered across the lands. Humans learned magic by unravelling those miracles, figuring out how to recreate them or make spin-offs of them.
And then a new ‘pantheon’ swept in, and slaughtered the previous not-gods, upending everything.
Well, not everything, because they don’t actually meddle in human affairs that much. They have their own things going on. Like collecting souls, because that’s a whole Thing. We’re not talking about human-looking gods, by the way, like the Norse or Celtic or Greek gods you’re probably familiar with; these are fucking weird horrifying eldritch things that make you want to run away screaming, and that reflex is your survival instinct and you should listen to it.
Karys soul her soul – kinda – to a not-god who lets her…not speak with the dead, but interact with them a bit. Kinda. And she accidentally rescues someone. And then has to run, far and fast, not just to get this person to safety, but also because there are suddenly a lot of other sell-souls who do not want this person rescued and are very eager to kill anyone and everyone who disagrees with them.
And that doesn’t give you the first CLUE what this book is like, not really, because it’s not the plot that makes Asunder special (although it’s an excellent plot): it’s the WILDLY WEIRD imagination that’s gone into this setting and the magic and the not-gods; it’s the achingly intense relationships between all the characters, wherein every combination of characters has a very different dynamic to any other combination; it’s the prose, which is like lightning and velvet and sharp glass. It’s a book like a punch to the face and the kind of kiss that changes your life. I don’t know how to describe it; I’ve been battering myself black and blue trying to review it, to do it justice, and I am failing, and to be honest I’m not sure anyone can do it justice. There’s nothing I can tell you that will even half-prepare you for this one.
I gasped and ranted and wept over this book, my friends. I can’t get it out of my head. I need it tattooed on my skin. Forget best book of the year, Asunder is one of the best of the decade, and I need everyone to read it.
EVERYONE.
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