Steph Swainston, Fair Rebel
Castle #5 (Gollancz)
Steph Swainston’s much-anticipated return to her uniquely imagined fantasy world of the Fourlands.
Fifteen years after the last devastating Insect attack, the immortal Circle is finally ready to launch an offensive against their implacable enemies. This time they have a new weapon – gunpowder. Hopes are high.
But the Circle’s plans are threatened when the vital barrels of gunpowder go missing. Jant, the Circle’s winged messenger, is tasked to investigate. Soon it becomes clear that the theft is part of a deadly conspiracy . . . and Jant and his friends are among the targets.
As tensions rise, Jant races to foil the conspirators. Can he expose them in time – or will the crisis blow the Fourlands apart?
About Steph Swainston:
Steph Swainston is from Bradford. She began writing fiction at an early age for her own entertainment and enlightenment and never quite stopped. Since 2004 she has been writing for others’ entertainment too, and is author of the acclaimed ‘Castle’ series which includes the novels The Year of Our War, No Present Like Time, The Modern World and Above the Snowline.
Among many other jobs, Steph has worked as a bookseller, an archaeologist, a lock-keeper, an information scientist and a pyrotechnician. While eclectic employment is an established tradition in author biographies, Steph would rather have got a fat salary doing something important-sounding in finance like other Cambridge graduates, but it turned out navigating life with SIJD, Asperger’s Syndrome, and a humanities degree made that surprisingly difficult.
Ultimately, Steph is happiest writing. When not writing, she likes hiking, the natural world, and reading neurology.