book blog by Heena Rathore-Pardeshi | Of Whiskers And Words
Author: Heena R. Pardeshi
Heena is the author of the award-winning novel Deceived. She works as the novel critic and the chief editor at a local publishing house in Pune, India. She is an animal lover as well as an animal activist.
She loves books, music and wine. Travelling and learning about new cultures is an integral part of her life.
She is presently learning Piano and French language.
She lives in Pune, India with her beloved husband and 6 cats.
Author:Scott Zimmerman Release Date: 20 April 2026 Series: Genre: Historical Fiction, Thriller Format: E-book Pages: 371 pages Publisher: Kostya Publishing Blurb: He survived genocide. Nazis. Stalin. Now he’s being hunted. Kostya is a Ukrainian boy who endures brutal Nazi forced labor, Allied bombings, and Stalin’s enslavement in the Ural Mountains. When WWII ends, the danger doesn’t. He’s sent to a Soviet filtration camp. These were extreme and often fatal. To escape in 1946, he races across Russia with the secret police closing in — jumping from trains, hiding in bombed-out barns — while falling in love. The romance will pull your heartstrings. But survival forces an impossible choice: break a promise he cannot betray, or lose everything. A gripping true story of resilience, integrity, and extraordinary courage.
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
Kostya by Scott Zimmerman is a powerful historical fiction novel inspired by the true story of Konstantin “Kostya” Lysenko, a Ukrainian boy whose life is shaped by the Holodomor, Nazi occupation, forced labour, imprisonment, escape, Soviet suspicion, and the long, almost impossible journey back home. Beginning in 1932 Mariupol, the novel immediately establishes itself as a story of survival under two brutal regimes: first Stalin’s engineered famine, then Hitler’s war machine.
What stood out to me was the book’s relentless sense of movement. Kostya’s journey takes him from famine-stricken Ukraine to German farms, coal mines, penal camps, bombed bridges, liberated territory, Soviet-controlled routes, interrogations, checkpoints, forests, and finally back toward Mariupol. The novel never allows survival to feel simple. Each escape leads to another danger and each liberation contains another trap. Zimmerman captures the terrible irony of Kostya’s life: he survives the Nazis, only to face new suspicion from the Soviet system he is technically supposed to belong to.
Kostya himself is a strong protagonist because he is not written as a superhuman hero. He is impatient, young, stubborn, frightened, sometimes naïve, but also observant, resilient, and morally anchored. His father’s lessons about integrity run through the novel like a silent moral thread. Again and again, Kostya is forced to ask what integrity means when the world has become lawless, when survival requires deception, and when every authority claims the right to own a person’s body.
The historical scope is one of the book’s greatest strengths. The early Holodomor chapters are especially devastating, showing starvation as real, bodily horror. Later, the sections in the German farm, Victoria Coal Mine, Wesel penal camp, and the bridge bombing are vivid, cinematic, and physically immersive. Author Zimmerman is particularly effective at showing systems: the Nazi machinery of forced labour, the Soviet bureaucracy of suspicion, and the way ordinary people are crushed between ideologies that destroy individual lives.
The book is also deeply interested in home; not as a sentimental destination, but as something almost mythic. For Kostya, home is memory, duty, promise, identity, and unfinished moral business. The ending, especially the small act of returning the buried tin can, is extremely beautiful. It does not erase what has happened, but it gives the story a rare moment of balance, as if one tiny moral debt can still be corrected in a world that has stolen almost everything.
That said, Kostya is a heavy and sometimes demanding read. The prose is direct and dramatic, and some historical explanations are presented quite explicitly, which may feel slightly expository to readers who prefer subtler integration of history into fiction. The novel’s structure is also episodic by nature, moving from crisis to crisis, which gives it momentum but occasionally reduces the space for subtler interior reflection. However, given the scale of the story and the extraordinary circumstances of Kostya’s survival, that forward-driving structure largely works.
Overall, Kostya is a gripping, humane, and emotionally resonant historical novel about endurance, moral courage, and the cost of surviving history’s most brutal machinery. It is painful, vivid, and often difficult to read, but also very worthwhile. Author Zimmerman honours Kostya by showing him as a boy and then a man who keeps choosing life, truth, and home even when every system around him tries to strip those things away.
Author:Jae Darcy Release Date: 1 May 2026 Series: Genre: Young-Adult, Science-Fiction, Dystopia, Cyberpunk Format: E-book Pages: 407 pages Publisher: Pomegranate Seed Press Blurb: In 2164, reality is something you can buy. The wealthy live online in a gleaming virtual world wired directly into their bodies from birth. Those left outside keep the lights on in an abandoned world. Bache Parker is eighteen, exiled, and forgotten. His bioware was destroyed in a hack gone wrong, and now he spends his days tending the comatose bodies of people living the life he lost. When a blind girl from a neo-Luddite community asks him to help deliver a virus that will bring the Inside crashing down, he should walk away. He doesn’t.
Ayven Reynolds has never seen the Inside. She’ hasn’t seen anything at all, until Bache wires her in, and the world her people call an abomination gives her back her sight. Now the virus is live, the stakes are real, and everything both of them thought they believed is suddenly negotiable.
Extropia is a YA cyberpunk novel about power, identity, and what it costs to see the world clearly — even when you’ve been blind your whole life.
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Extropia by Jae Darcy is an ambitious, emotionally charged sci-fi dystopian novel set in a future where humanity has split itself between the physical world and the seductive virtual realm known as the Inside. In 2164, the world outside has decayed into poverty, surveillance, abandoned cities, religious resistance movements, and corporate control, while the wealthy and privileged live much of their lives inside sensory tanks. Against this sharp divide, author Darcy builds a story that is part cyberpunk adventure, part political rebellion, part coming-of-age drama, and part tender, slow-burning romance.
The novel follows two beautifully contrasted protagonists: Bache Parker, a gifted former hacker whose access to the Inside has been destroyed after a disastrous raid, and Ayven Reynolds, a blind sixteen-year-old from a New Green commune in the Cascade Mountains. Bache is bitter, funny, wounded, reckless, and deeply lonely; Ayven is brave, perceptive, principled, and far less fragile than the world around her assumes. Their first meeting itself sets the tone for one of the book’s strongest elements: the gradual, electric, emotionally complicated trust that develops between them.
What stands out most is the worldbuilding. Author Darcy’s future Seattle is vivid and cinematic with tank towers, Bootjack patrols, abandoned districts, underground routes, access decks, meat-minders, body tanks, hackers, New Greens, and the wealthy Avar society of the Inside. The contrast between Ayven’s mountain world and Bache’s decaying city world gives the novel a strong ideological tension. Neither side is treated as wholly pure. The Inside offers beauty, safety, pleasure, and freedom from bodily limitation, but it also enables abandonment, inequality, and disconnection from the dying physical world. The New Greens value nature, community, and embodiment, but their society also contains patriarchy, coercion, secrecy, and fanaticism.
Bache and Ayven are the emotional heart of the novel. Their bond works because it is not instant perfection. It begins with suspicion, betrayal, practical necessity, and ideological disagreement before becoming intimate. Bache’s cynicism meets Ayven’s moral seriousness; Ayven’s sheltered certainty meets Bache’s painful knowledge of systems, power, and compromise. Their conversations about reality, illusion, the body, technology, nature, and freedom are some of the book’s most thoughtful passages.
The secondary characters are also strong. Dex and Sarna bring history, loyalty, guilt, and urgency to Bache’s arc, while Seth and Elijah complicate Ayven’s world in very different ways. Elijah, in particular, is an effective antagonist because he wraps control in the language of faith and collective duty. Billy Severn’s presence adds another layer of menace, connecting personal grievance to large-scale violence. Linus Ross and NeuroGen, meanwhile, deepen the book’s critique of corporate power, inherited privilege, and the myth of technological salvation.
That said, Extropia is a substantial read. The book is long, dense, and structurally expansive, with many moving parts: political history, hacker mythology, tank technology, religious ideology, romance, pursuit, rebellion, and corporate conspiracy. Readers looking for a lean, fast sci-fi thriller may find the pacing deliberate in places, especially where the novel pauses to explain the mechanics of the Inside or the political situation outside it. However, for readers who enjoy immersive speculative fiction with emotional stakes and layered worldbuilding, that density becomes part of the appeal.
Overall, Extropia is a compelling, richly imagined, and emotional dystopian sci-fi novel. It combines cyberpunk atmosphere, ecological anxiety, class conflict, forbidden romance, and questions of identity into a story that feels both intimate and large in scope.
Author:Tara Hodgson Release Date: 15 October 2025 Series: Genre: Young-Adult, Psychological Thriller Format: E-book Pages: 366 pages Publisher:http://www.tarahodgson.ca Blurb: When the volleyball hits the floor mere inches from Reese’s hands, her dreams of playing college ball shatter. After consecutive failures on the court, in the classroom, and in her relationships, she’s done playing the part of perfect daughter, perfect student, and perfect athlete. It’s time for a new life. Enter Cassie Brentwood. Bold. Reckless. Free. Cassie is everything Reese isn’t yet longs to be. They quickly become friends and Cassie introduces her to Liam, a mysterious guy from Snapchat. Blinded by his love bombing and the desperation to shed her perfect image, Reese plunges head first into their world. It feels instantly thrilling… until it’s not.
Girls are disappearing from nearby towns, however no one in their quiet small town seems concerned. But when Liam’s behaviour grows darker, Reese’s new life begins to unravel. She ignores the warnings. The red flags. The little voice screaming to her that something’s not right. Until she’s far from home, trapped in a nightmare she can’t escape. With no one left to trust, Reese has to fight to reclaim the life she was so eager to leave behind. She wanted freedom. Now, she just wants to go home. At least she has to try. Told with searing honesty and lyrical depth, At Least I’m Trying is a poignant novel about mental health, girlhood, and what happens when the version of yourself you’ve worked so hard to become starts to fall apart.
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
At Least I’m Trying by Tara Hodgson is a raw, gripping, and emotionally intense YA psychological thriller about perfectionism, vulnerability, grooming, friendship, trauma, and the devastating consequences of wanting to become someone else. The story follows Reese Muller, a high-achieving volleyball player and “perfect” daughter whose life begins to unravel after one bad game, a failed scout opportunity, a breakup with Gabe, and growing distance from her best friend Willow.
What makes the book compelling is how carefully author Hodgson builds Reese’s emotional collapse before the external danger fully takes over. Reese is not reckless in a simple way; she is exhausted, lonely, over-pressured, and desperate to stop being the version of herself everyone expects. Her parents’ perfectionism, her comparison with Lizzy, her breakup with Gabe, and her resentment toward Willow create the precise emotional vulnerability that Cassie, Liam, and Seth exploit.
The alternating “Before” and “After” structure works well, giving the novel a constant sense of dread. We know from the beginning that something terrible has happened, and every choice Reese makes feels loaded with danger. The missing-girls fragments between chapters sharpen that tension further, making the reader aware of a larger pattern even when Reese herself is too overwhelmed to see it clearly.
The strongest relationship in the book is Reese and Willow’s fractured friendship. Their bond is loving but strained, and the novel is honest about how shame can make a person push away the very people who might save them. Gabe is also handled with more nuance than expected; he is not perfect, but his concern for Reese reads as genuine. Cassie, meanwhile, is one of the most interesting characters because she functions as both mirror and warning: another girl trying to escape her own pain, but through choices that lead Reese deeper into danger.
The book is difficult to read in places because it deals with grooming, coercion, sexual exploitation, emotional abuse, intoxication, and trauma. Author Hodgson does not romanticise danger and shows how manipulation often works through attention, validation, secrecy, and the promise of freedom. Liam’s charm is frightening precisely because Reese initially experiences it as relief.
That said, the novel is emotionally heavy and sometimes repetitive in its interiority. Reese’s spirals around failure, worthlessness, perfection, and not being “enough” are psychologically believable, but some readers may find the narration intense and claustrophobic. However, that closeness to Reese’s mind is also the book’s main strength. We are not simply watching bad decisions from the outside; we are inside the emotional logic that makes those decisions feel possible.
Overall, At Least I’m Trying is a powerful, unsettling, and socially relevant YA thriller. It is not just a story about a girl in danger, but also about how danger finds girls who are already isolated, ashamed, and desperate to be seen. Honest, painful, and compulsively readable, this is a novel that understands both teenage vulnerability and the terrifying sophistication of manipulation.
Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuring Scott Zimmerman for their latest release, KOSTYA.
Book: KOSTYA: Inspired by a True Story Author: Scott Zimmerman Publication Date: 20 April 2026 Publisher: Kostya Publishing Pages: 371 Genre: Historical Fiction/Thriller Available Formats: ebook, paperback, hardback Fact: Western media knows very little about the horrific genocide in Ukraine in 1932. Additionally, this book is a fascinating new perspective on WWII—from the Ukrainian perspective. It is sort of like The Pianist meets The Fugitive.
About the Book
What if you were forced to choose between the only thing you’ve ever wanted and a promise you cannot break?
INSPIRED BY A GRIPPING TRUE STORY.
A Ukrainian boy becomes a man after enduring years of genocide, brutal Nazi forced labor, Allied bombings, and Stalin’s enslavement cutting trees in the Ural Mountains. Post-WWII ‘filtration camps’ in Russia were extreme, and often fatal. To escape the Soviet MVD secret police in 1946, he races across Russia jumping from trains and bridges, and hiding in barns and bombed-out houses.
He falls in love in the most unexpected way and is forced to make a heartbreaking lifesaving decision. By the way, she’s brilliant, and is exactly who Kostya needs at just the right time. He uses everything he’s ever learned in years of captivity, and cleverly delays capture in freight trains, sinking boats, and postal trucks until he faces yet another life-threatening critical test. But even extraordinary courage, and incredible grit and wit cannot evade the commanding and experienced MVD general.
You’ve got to see what happens in the dramatic climax.
KOSTYA is an epic story about love, war, endurance, and integrity.
“This powerful World War II novel delivers a deeply personal and harrowing account of survival, resilience, and the human spirit under unimaginable conditions. From the very first pages, the writing pulls you into Kostya’s world with vivid, unflinching detail. KOSTYA is a well-written, emotionally intense novel that I couldn’t put down. If you’re looking for a World War II survival story that is raw, realistic, and unforgettable, this book is absolutely worth your time.“ – Reviewed by Don Jung, Underrated Reads
“If you are looking for a historical novel flavored with drama, thrills, gritty realism, and suspense, KOSTYA is a must-read. Here, Zimmerman weaves a compelling, visceral tale of survival, resilience, love, sheer luck, fate, and sacrifices. The raw, dynamic prose transported me back to the 1930s-40s Europe, giving me a glimpse of the harsh circumstances Ukrainians faced under Stalin’s rule and World War II. The vivid imagery captured the setting and mood with cinematic precision. I must applaud Zimmerman for delivering this heart-stopping and incredible story in such an intriguing way. It would make a great historical movie. I will definitely read this story again. I’m eagerly awaiting the next installment.” – Reviewed by Keith Mbuya for Readers’ Favorite
“The prose is strong. The descriptions in particular enchanted me. I felt like I was in each place Kostya visited. The author really did a good job presenting the world of the time periods presented. Dialogue is also quite good. Conversations flowed well, and the difference in speaking voices between characters was quite fun to read. I found the romantic relationship Kostya experienced quite charming. Sometimes the closest relationships are the ones formed by chance. Their youthful willingness to love in a world of cruelty was quite well done.” – Reviewed by Grimdaniel Blog
“The final part of the book is the most gripping and exhibits a detailed knowledge and understanding of the way a regime driven by fear and corruption enables ruthless individuals to cover up the most heinous wrongdoing. Throughout the book Kostya’s sense of integrity and his dedication to the values instilled in him by his parents and grandparents are foremost. Often tested to near destruction, his will to persevere in his quest to return to Mariupol and discover if his family have survived remains central to his every action. In the final stages it is strengthened, but not derailed, by the love of a young woman who assists his escape from the Russian authorities. She is just one of several well drawn characters who play key roles in Kostya’s journey. Whether supportive or determined to out-manoeuvre him, they are all fully developed individuals. There are no obvious stereotypes.“ – Reviewed by Frank Parker, Rosie’s Blog
About The Author
Scott Zimmerman
Scott has always loved reading. When he was seven years old, he got a copy of Huckleberry Finn on a Saturday morning. He didn’t stop reading until he finished it that night, only taking a break when his mom called him to dinner. As a teenager, Scott began a career as a professional flying disc athlete and won 17 world and US championships, while setting several distance throwing world records. He then pursued a career as a software engineer and cloud architect. He retired in 2020 to enjoy writing and playing disc golf. KOSTYA is his first novel. He’s married living in Georgia.
You can find author Zimmerman here: Website | Amazon
If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com
Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuring Jae Darcy for their latest release, Extropia.
Book: Extropia Author: Jae Darcy Publication Date: 1 May 2026 Publisher: Pomegranate Seed Press Pages: 416 Genre: Young-Adult, Dystopia, Science-Fiction Available Formats: Kindle ebook, trade paperback For Readers who Enjoyed:Feed by M.T. Anderson, Warcross by Marie Lu, Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness Fun Fact: Bache Parker started life in online writing forums, years before this book existed — long before The Matrix came out. He was getting thrown out of school and making a spectacular mess of himself in other stories, and I found him so compelling that I eventually had to ask where someone like him ends up.
About the Book
In 2164, reality is something you can buy. The wealthy live online in a gleaming virtual world wired directly into their bodies from birth. Those left outside keep the lights on in an abandoned world.
Bache Parker is eighteen, exiled, and forgotten. His bioware was destroyed in a hack gone wrong, and now he spends his days tending the comatose bodies of people living the life he lost. When a blind girl from a neo-Luddite community asks him to help deliver a virus that will bring the Inside crashing down, he should walk away.
He doesn’t.
Ayven Reynolds has never seen the Inside. She’ hasn’t seen anything at all, until Bache wires her in, and the world her people call an abomination gives her back her sight. Now the virus is live, the stakes are real, and everything both of them thought they believed is suddenly negotiable.
Extropia is a YA cyberpunk novel about power, identity, and what it costs to see the world clearly — even when you’ve been blind your whole life.
Jae Darcy is the author of Extropia. She is a content writer and marketer who lives in the starry hills of Western Massachusetts. She first dreamt up Bache, Ayven and their world in 1996, when she entered her first online RPG chatroom, and has been astonished to watch this reality get closer and closer every year since. You can sign up to get updates about their writing here.
If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com
Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuringTom Lysaghtfor their latest release, The Fatima File: The Case of the Missing Millennium.
Book: THE FATIMA FILE: The Case of the Missing Millennium Author: Tom Lysaght Publication Date: 12 May 2026 Publisher: – Pages: 416 Genre: Religious Mystery, Political Thriller, Suspense Available Formats: Ebook and Paperback For Readers who Enjoyed:
About the Book
She uncovered a secret that powerful men will kill to protect.
Former nun Dr. Jackie McBride once sought heaven. Now, as an astrophysicist, she searches the heavens for truth.
When Jackie uncovers collusion between the Vatican Observatory and a shadow American cabal, she finds evidence of a suppressed reality guarded for generations with lethal force.
The Fatima File contains a revelation powerful enough to fracture the foundations of religious belief—and expose the military-industrial security state.
Now Jackie is a target.
As CIA operatives close in, she joins forces with a disillusioned FBI agent, a Jesuit priest, and a devout circle of young Shi’ah Muslims.
Together they follow a trail of deception from Fatima to Rome to Mount Sinai.
But every revelation brings Jackie closer to a truth more dangerous than the men hunting her.
Because the greatest danger is not the conspiracy.
It is the secret itself.
The Fatima File: The Case of the Missing Millennium is a conspiracy thriller of religious-political intrigue, covert power, and a revelation that could redefine reality.
“An exceptional novel, with great pacing and characters, playing into the zeitgeist of what’s haunting us as a society today.” — Andra Miller, former Executive Editor at Random House
Raised Irish-Catholic in Brooklyn, Harvard graduate Tom Lysaght has written some 30 plays in both English and Spanish. His Off-Broadway play, Nobody Don’t Like Yogi, starring Emmy-winning actor Ben Gazzara as Yogi Berra, toured nationally. He was founding director and resident playwright of El Teatro de Pan y Paz (Bread and Peace Theater), while also serving as Manager of Radio Bahá’í of Lake Titicaca during his three-year residence in the Andes of Peru. He is the recipient of some dozen writing fellowships, including the MacDowell Colony, the Edward Albee Foundation, Scotland’s Hawthornden Castle, and the Israeli Center for the Arts. His published prose includes a historical novel (Persian Passion, 2019), a generational memoir (Old Wives’ Tales, 2022), and a collection of memories and essays (The Inner Atlas, 2025). A chapter of his memoir, Till Your Father Comes Home, can be read on his website, Social Drama/Sacred Space, which serves as a resource for utilizing theater in grassroots community building: Visit that resource or Tom him at: http://www.yourcreativestage.com/
His illustrated novella, Valley of the Birds, a fable of flight, and the second volume of his Persian Passion trilogy are both forthcoming. Lysaght lives in Los Angeles.
If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com
Author:A.B. Acharya Release Date: 2 March 2026 Series: Juggernaut Series (Book #1) Genre: Medical Conspiracy Thriller Format: E-book Pages: 334 pages Publisher: – Blurb: He came to fix the world’s most dangerous drug. The drug had other plans. Narin Roy is writing his confession in a police interrogation room, and the only thing keeping him calm is the drug that started it all. Months earlier, he was a disgraced scientist with one shot left: a job at Harvester Pharmaceuticals, developing a therapeutic version of DMTA, the compound behind Red Sky, the street drug that can make you brilliant but occasionally turns you into a killer. Narin has a secret weapon: a formula on a flash drive that could crack the problem no one else has solved. All he has to do is survive Harvester long enough to use it. But Harvester is not what it appears. Behind its gleaming façade, Narin finds himself caught between a charismatic lawyer whose charm conceals a ruthless agenda, an embittered scientist who built the company and may be destroying it, and a project so classified that its true purpose makes his blood run cold. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure haunts his dreams, a desert prince who trains him for a battle he doesn’t yet understand. As the weeks pass, Narin can’t tell anymore where the science ends and his unraveling begins. The voices may be hallucinations. The visions may be warnings. And the confession he’s writing, the one that brought him to this cold interrogation room, may not end the way anyone expects. Red Sky is a propulsive psychological thriller for readers who like their conspiracies dark, their narrators unreliable, and their endings earned.
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Red Sky by A.B. Acharya is a strange, cerebral, darkly funny psychological thriller that begins inside a police interrogation room and then spirals backward through grief, ambition, pharmaceutical corruption, academic failure, obsession, hallucination, and murder. The novel is written as the confession of Narin Roy, a thirty-year-old pharmacology researcher whose life unravels after his work on DMTA, the street drug known as Red Sky, pulls him into the orbit of Harvester Pharmaceuticals, Ian Blair, Maru Chandra, Morey Whitely, and Sophie Whitely.
What makes the book immediately compelling is Narin’s voice. He is precise, awkward, resentful, brilliant, self-pitying, funny, frightening, and oddly vulnerable. The narration works because it never allows the reader to feel fully stable. Narin is telling us everything, but we are never entirely sure how much of what he understands is true, distorted, drug-altered, or self-serving. His scientific explanations of Red Sky, the “switch,” Type I and Type II receptors, and his proposed drug breakthrough give the novel a strong speculative-scientific foundation, but the real tension lies in watching how his intellect becomes both his gift and his trap.
The book is at its best when it blends science with psychological horror. The pharmaceutical world of Harvester is particularly effective, Ian’s charisma, Maru’s hostility, Morey’s volatility, and the strange corporate machinery around DMTA make the company feel less like a workplace and more like a trap waiting to close.
Narin’s relationships give the book its emotional complexity. His scenes with Deepa are especially strong because they reveal the fragile, emotional side beneath his arrogance and alienation. His complicated attachment to Sophie is more unsettling than romantic, and that is exactly what makes it work. Ian, meanwhile, is one of the novel’s most intriguing figures: manipulative, generous, damaged, theatrical, and entangled in the very tragedy Narin is trying to explain.
Thematically, Red Sky is rich and unsettling. It explores the seduction of “fixing” the human mind, the ethics of pharmaceutical ambition, the loneliness of immigrant expectation, academic exploitation, mental illness, addiction, masculinity, obsession, and the dangerous fantasy of becoming exceptional enough to justify everything. The drug itself becomes more than a plot device. Red Sky is a metaphor for clarity that may be delusion, transcendence that may be destruction, and happiness that may be chemically engineered at the cost of reality.
That said, this is not a light or fast thriller. The novel is long, intensely interior, and often digressive. Narin explains, analyzes, doubles back, rationalizes, and frequently disappears into scientific, personal, or philosophical tangents. For readers who prefer tight, plot-driven suspense, the pacing may feel demanding. However, for readers who enjoy unreliable narrators, morally murky speculative fiction, and psychological thrillers that let the mind itself become the crime scene, the density is part of the experience.
Overall, Red Sky is an ambitious, intelligent, and unsettling novel. It combines speculative neuroscience, corporate conspiracy, psychological horror, immigrant family drama, and noir-like confession into something distinctive and difficult to categorise. It is messy in places, but deliberately so; its instability mirrors Narin’s own fractured mind. This is a book for readers who like their thrillers dark, intellectual, uncomfortable, and psychologically strange.
Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuring Andrew Beardmore for their latest release, The Strains of Malice.
Book: The Strains of Malice Author: Andrew Beardmore Publication Date: 28/2/2025 Publisher: Ryelands Books (an imprint of Halsgrove Publishing) Pages: 397 Genre: Epic Fantasy Available Formats: Ebook and Paperback For Readers who Enjoyed: Cold Sanctuary (Book Two of The Nessemiah). Many reviewers (including LoveReading) compare The Nessemiah to A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) Out next month: The Awakening (Book Three of The Nessemiah); The Kiss of Nessemi (Book Four of The Nessemiah)
About the Book
Book one of the gripping new historical fantasy series, The Nessemiah. Is anywhere on Thera safe from Nessemi? Or the hell that lies beyond? “I’m afraid there are good and bad everywhere, Emilya. It’s a fact of life that wherever you look, there are strains of malice.” Fifteen-year-old baker’s daughter, Emilya Luca, is in serious trouble with the Glennadian Crown. Her crime: to prevent a small dog from being torn apart by hounds belonging to the callous Prince Magnus. Having been rescued by former naval captain, Jake Oscom, the unlikely pair become fugitives, hunted across Glennad – initially for cruel sport but latterly after Oscom is framed for a heinous crime committed by Magnus himself. Elsewhere, in a world with unusual geographical quirks and subtle energy lines, hardships endure for a close-knit community of miners and unimaginable foul play befalls a Glennadian princess – but these trials pale into insignificance compared to what northern astronomers have just discovered. Four hundred leagues south, in the ancient city of Thera, the cruel eyes of Calidius Antoninus Dominius have seen the same thing – but to him it merely expedites his imperial ambitions and presents a justified opportunity to brutally murder thousands of his subjects.
‘This is an authentic and well developed epic fantasy world with lots of heroes to root for and villains to dislike. It reminds me of A Song of Ice and Fire. Prince Magnus certainly gives Joffrey a run for his money!’ – LoveReading
‘Beardmore is a fantastic storyteller with a penchant for meticulous details. He crafts a world so humanistically flawed and tremendously intriguing.’ – onlinebookclub.org
Andrew Beardmore is the award-winning author of the four-book epic fantasy series, The Nessemiah. The series commenced with Book One, The Strains of Malice, described by one reviewer as “a sweeping and sophisticated debut to a historical fantasy series that merges human frailty, political intrigue, and cosmic mystery into one masterfully interwoven tale.” Meanwhile, professional media reviewers constantly compare The Nessemiah series to George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Frank Herbert’s Dune. In terms of accolades, The Strains of Malice has recently won the Literary Titan Gold Award in April 2026 and BookViral’s Golden Quill Award in May 2026.
Media praise for The Nessemiah:
“Poldark meets Gladiator…on another world!” – Ryelands Books
“This authentic and well-developed epic fantasy world reminds me of A Song of Ice and Fire. Prince Magnus certainly gives Joffrey a run for his money!” – LoveReading
“Beardmore is a fantastic storyteller with a penchant for meticulous details. He crafts a world so humanistically flawed and tremendously intriguing.” – OnlineBookClub
“The book’s plot is complex, and it features a huge cast of characters, but Beardmore’s skill in developing his storylines is exceptional.” — BookBrowse
“The Strains of Malice stands out for immersive worldbuilding, well-timed twists, and a cast that is vivid and easy to root for.” — Literary Titan
“The Strains of Malice is a richly layered epic fantasy featuring memorable characters, political intrigue and immersive worldbuilding.” — BookViral
“Cold Sanctuary occupies a compelling space between fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction, with echoes of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Frank Herbert’s Dune. The result is ambitious, layered, and expansive. It is easy to be drawn into this world, and easier still to trust that the story is in the hands of a master storyteller.” — Literary Titan
Prior to fantasy success, Andrew authored the acclaimed “Unusual & Quirky” series of local history books, each delivering a detailed history of an English county, interspersed with eyebrow-raising anecdotes known as Quirk Alerts!
Andrew’s extensive historical knowledge was then used to great effect in bringing to life the vibrant, authentic world of Thera in The Nessemiah.
If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com
Author:Holly B. Gutwillinger Release Date: 14 February 2026 Series: Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Animal Fiction Format: E-book Pages: 264 pages Publisher: Ramblings From The Little Shed Publishing Blurb: Renley Nelsen’s life is unravelling. She’s caught between midlife melancholy, her sons have drifted away, and her mother’s mind is slipping beyond reach. Sully, the youngest in a pack of abandoned dogs in Ontario’s northern woods, knows only survival. Neglected and scarred, his distrust run deep. When Renley’s closest friend begs her to join a dog rescue mission, she sees an escape. However, the broken animals, especially Sully, force her to confront more than she bargained for. As she works to dave the pack, Renley discovers hidden strength and faces an impossible choice: keep running or find the courage to claim the life she deserves. Told from alternating perspectives between Renley and Sully, this is a story of mutual acceptance, where woman and dog must learn that healing demands the bravery to stay, when everything inside you wants to run.
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
North of Broken & Furever Home by Holly B. Gutwillinger is a warm, emotional, dog-centred novel about grief, rescue, midlife restlessness, family tension, and the strange, healing ways animals enter our lives exactly when we need them. The story follows Renley, a forty-seven-year-old wife, mother, shelter volunteer, and lifelong “serial starter,” who is still grieving the loss of her dog Chance while trying to understand what her life means now that her sons are leaving home. Parallel to Renley’s story is Sully’s: a young stray dog trying to survive in the northern wilderness after being separated from his mother and pack.
The dual perspective is the book’s most distinctive feature. Renley’s chapters are grounded in the recognisable messiness of domestic life whereas Sully’s chapters, told from the dog’s point of view, bring a very different emotional cadence that is vulnerable, instinctive, sometimes heartbreaking, and often surprisingly funny. His world of Mama, Middle Dog, Big Dog, Salty Dog, Lazy Dog, Tree, and the humans who may or may not be safe gives the novel its tenderest emotional pull.
What I appreciated most is that author Gutwillinger does not make animal rescue look simple or sentimental. The book understands that rescue is not just the happy moment of bringing a dog home; it is fear, logistics, exhaustion, guilt, medical worries, failed placements, behavioural challenges, and the slow building of trust. The rescue trip to Hidden River is one of the strongest sections of the novel because it brings Renley’s internal arc and Sully’s survival story together. Renley is not only rescuing a dog; she is proving to herself that she can do hard things, step beyond the comfort of her routine, and still has a self outside motherhood, marriage, and responsibility.
What stayed with me most is the way the novel treats dogs not as accessories to human healing, but as emotional beings with fear, memory, attachment, confusion, and their own need for safety. Sully and Cash are not simply “rescues” who fix Renley’s life. They complicate it, expand it, exhaust it, and ultimately enrich it. By the end, the title’s playfulness feels earned: “furever home” is not just about where a dog lands, but about the ongoing work of choosing love, patience, and belonging every day.
Overall, North of Broken & Furever Home is a heartfelt and comforting novel for readers who love animal stories, family dramas, and gentle emotional journeys. It is tender without being weightless, honest without being bleak, and especially moving in its understanding that healing rarely arrives suddenly. Sometimes, it comes in muddy paws, worried eyes, nervous tail wags, and the decision to open the door again.
Welcome to TRB Lounge. Today, I’d like to welcome Travis Peterson, author of Salvation Reigned, for an author interview with The Reading Bud.
About The Author
Travis Peterson
Travis James Peterson is a former Marine. He has spent much of his life analyzing the world through geospatial data. Reading patterns. Looking for truth in the noise by shaping chaos into something meaningful.
The story came the way most truths do. Slowly, like water undercutting a riverbank. Then all at once. Like a mass waste event dumping earth into a violent flow. For years it lived in fragments. Flashes of light, neon flames crawling across a dark sky. Images without a frame. It wasn’t until sleep was contingent on writing a few good words that the story started taking shape. Then dreamscapes fueled his race with the morning sun to capture a story that flashed behind closed eyes.
Travis writes dark, philosophical science fiction. Short, punchy, and unafraid of hard questions.
Welcome to TRB! Please give our readers a brief introduction about yourself before we begin. (We’d love to know beyond what your Author Bio says about you.)
I am a first-generation high school and college graduate, a former Marine, and I’ve spent much of my professional life working as a geographic information systems analyst. At my core, I’m deeply curious about the world. My career has focused on asking questions and solving problems through spatial analysis, which has shaped how I see everything around me. I tend to view life as a collection of interconnected systems, and I’m endlessly fascinated by the relationships between them. What intrigues me most is how a single small decision can lead to drastic and often unexpected consequences. The world is complex. Connections go unseen.
Beyond the official blurb, could you offer us a unique insight or a behind-the-scenes glimpse into your book?
This book came out of a need to clear my mind. A few years after I began meditating and journaling as an almost daily practice, I noticed that the routine helped soothe the physical tension I carried from everyday stress. Over time, coherent images began to form, and my journaling grew richer, less about my day or my aspirations, and more about interpretation. In many ways, the book is a reflection of the systems I see, filtered through a science fiction lens.
Every book has a starting point. What was the spark or pivotal moment that inspired you to write this one?
The spark for this book came from a feeling that I finally had something to say about the world. Through meditation and journaling, moments of stillness began to surface images and ideas that would not let go. My journaling shifted from daily reflection to capturing fragments of meaning and imagined worlds. Eventually, I realized I should write the book I wanted to read, without worrying about molds or expectations. Once I started, it felt like giving life to something that had been waiting to exist.
Is there a core message or theme in your book that you wish readers to discover?
The core message of the book ultimately became about systems, though that was never my original intention. It emerged naturally as the story unfolded. Systems fascinate me because they seem to take on a life of their own. Inputs move through processes and internal machinery, and the outcomes can be surprising and unpredictable. That is what happened with this book. The story developed like a system revealing itself through fiction, shaped by its own internal logic rather than a predetermined message.
Of all the characters in your book, do you have a personal favourite? What makes them special to you?
DDL1V35 emerged as my favorite character. The cybernaut began as a machine, but over the course of the story evolved into a thinking and feeling form of life that was more than circuits and polymer. It eventually became organic matter integrated with technology, and that transformation is what ultimately survived to tell the story. It turned into a witness and philosopher. That surprised me so much!
How do you approach character development, ensuring they resonate with readers and feel authentic?
I approach character development through mimicry and patterning, drawing inspiration from people I know, people I do not know, and imagined conversations. Many of the characters in the story represent different aspects of my own personality. I try to capture how people I have known move through the world, as well as how I experience the world around me, and translate that into fiction in a way that feels honest and recognizable.
What was the inspiration for this book? Was it an idea, an anecdote, a dream, or something else?
The story grew out of a sketch. Over time, I refined that initial image, and it eventually became the book cover. I found myself wondering what words could fit the brutalist image. The narrative was also heavily influenced by my journaling practice, where I pulled recurring themes from daily meditation and reflection. As the story developed, it became a warped reflection of how I experience and interpret the world around me.
How long did it take you to write this particular book?
I spent roughly a year working on this book. I originally envisioned it as a novel, but as this was my first book, I struggled to sustain the story at that length. At times, it felt like I was writing to meet a quota rather than telling the story itself. Eventually, I decided to let the story develop on its own terms and allow the length to be what the narrative demanded.
Are you working on any other stories presently?
I am writing every day. Even if it is only one line. I have this vision of a follow-up to Salvation Reigned. Not a part two. More like a collection. The way that I wrote – in such a fast fractured method – left a lot of areas to explore. I would like to shine a light on the dark corners of the universe I created.
Why have you chosen this genre? Or do you write in multiple genres?
I am such a fan of science fiction dystopian type books. It was just felt natural to try to express myself that way too. I really like reading philosophy and hard-science literature and that made it into my style too.
When did you decide to become a writer? Was it easy for you to follow your passion, or did you have to make some sacrifices along the way? (Feel free to share your story; we love hearing author stories!)
I decided to become a writer when I realized I finally had something to say that felt uniquely my own. That realization came gradually through meditation, journaling, and a willingness to look more honestly at my life. I have always noticed patterns, especially how small decisions can lead to unintended consequences and how accountability shapes who we become. For much of my life, writing was not an option I imagined for myself. Survival, fitting in, and conformity took precedence. Eventually, I reached a point where I felt the need to express who I was, rather than who I thought I was supposed to be. Writing became the way to do that.
What is your writing ritual? How do you do it?
“Ritual” is a funny way to describe my process, because writing this book became an act of discipline more than routine. I work a full-time job and have a full life with family, so making space for the book required consistency and deliberate choices. I used whatever time I had. Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. On airplanes, buses, and as a passenger in a car. Over time, the discipline deepened into something more like obsession. Writing, editing, and drawing began to fill every available space in my day. At times it felt like I was racing fate. Like, what if something happened to me, and I didn’t finish the story? Writing this story eventually became the reason I got up in the morning. I am looking forward to getting back to some hobbies I abandoned.
Editing can be a gruelling process. How do you approach revisions and self-editing?
Editing this book was uncomfortable, but necessary. I originally wrote about 29,000 words before realizing I was not writing a novel, but something much shorter. From there, I began cutting aggressively. I removed anything that slowed the story down, explained too much, or distracted from the core movement of the narrative. If a passage did not move the action forward, reflect emotion, or earn its place on the page, it was cut. At times, it felt brutal. This was also the first book I had ever edited, and I lost count of the number of revisions. I kept revising until I felt I was trying to be too clever, and that became my signal to stop. Throughout the process, I tried to trust my first instincts, especially when it came to word choice.
With the rise of audiobooks and multimedia experiences, have you considered exploring these avenues for your stories?
I think the book is very visual and has a strong narrative voice, which naturally lends itself to audio. I have considered that it could work well as an audiobook. While I do not have any concrete plans to explore that format yet, it is something I remain open to in the future.
Lastly, if you were to describe your writing style in three words, what would they be?
Fast. Deliberate. Ruthless.
How do you prefer to write—computer/laptop, typewriter, dictation, or longhand with a pen?
I tend to write more creatively when I am using a pen and paper.
What are your 5 favourite books? (You can share 5 favourite authors too.)
Steven King
Chuck Palahniuk
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Edgar Allan Poe
Hugh Howey
How do you deal with Writer’s Block?
I took walks, exercised, read, and listened to podcasts – paranormal, science, the strange.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
If you want to write something then do it. If you get stuck then write one word at a time. Let the story evolve. Don’t control it.
Thank you, authorPeterson, for taking the time to answer our questions and for all your brilliant and insightful answers!
About the Book
Salvation Reigned
A rogue planet is coming. Humanity’s last city has a plan. You won’t like it. Pete wakes in POD 217 with blood on his face and no memory of yesterday. The Last Great City is clean, pleasurable, and perfectly controlled — as long as its citizens follow the cycle. Reset. Comply. Repeat. Pete keeps failing the reset. Somewhere in the city, a woman named Marla is looking for him. Somewhere in the past, two scientists just watched something enormous pass in front of Betelgeuse. And somewhere at the edge of a dying wasteland, a cybernaut older than civilization is sitting under a cherry tree, watching the feral descendants of humanity dance under a dying star. Salvation Reigned moves across fractured time and colliding perspectives — the scientists who saw it coming, the city that chose control over truth, the lovers whose bond survives every attempt to erase it, and the machine left behind to witness what persists when everything else is gone. Raw. Nonlinear. Uncompromising. This is not a story about heroes. It is a story about what love, memory, and consciousness do when a system tries to delete them. Adult content: extreme language and graphic violence. For fans of Philip K. Dick, Chuck Palahniuk, and Jeff VanderMeer.
If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com
Author:A-M Mawhiney Release Date: 24 November 2021 Series: Genre: Dystopian, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction Format: E-book Pages: 308 pages Publisher: FriesenPress Blurb: Racism, climate change, and violence are in the past. The new world values respect and collaboration with others. But are there secrets lurking in the shadows of the Land of Hope? What truth about the past is being covered up? When fifteen-year-old Fania returns from Immersion, she is shattered to learn that the next phase of her education is at home with Alicia, her granny. She had hoped for something far grander that would prepare her for an important role with the Earth Project. Their two strong personalities clash as Fania begins to learn more about the past and her family’s role in it. As Fania grows in confidence and power, she starts to wonder exactly what secrets Alicia is keeping in her underground lab. After Fania discovers the truth, she finds her calling: one that has the power to change everything.
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Spindrifts by A-M Mawhiney is a thoughtful, hopeful, and ambitious work of speculative fiction set in a future shaped by pandemics, ecological collapse, social reform, and the long, unfinished work of healing Earth. Rather than imagining the future as pure dystopia, author Mawhiney builds something gentler and more difficult: a world that has survived catastrophe and is trying, imperfectly but sincerely, to become better.
At the centre of the novel is Fania, a fifteen-year-old returning home after two years at Immersion, where young people are assessed and guided toward their future contribution to the Earth Project. Fania expects purpose, clarity, and perhaps even adventure with people “From Away.” Instead, she is assigned to apprentice with her great-grandmother Alicia, the brilliant researcher who discovered the serum that changed the course of the plague years. What begins as disappointment gradually becomes a layered journey of family history, hidden truths, emotional inheritance, and self-discovery.
One of the strongest parts of the book is its intergenerational family structure. Alicia, Hope, Kaib, Kizhep, Jojo, Fania, and Nuna all live within a household where love is abundant, but so are hierarchy, silence, unresolved grief, and old patterns of control. Author Mawhiney writes family life with warmth and patience. Fania’s relationship with Nuna is especially tender. Their sisterly bond, strengthened through music, memory, and a form of telepathic connection, gives the novel much of its emotional light.
The worldbuilding is fascinating because it feels both futuristic and deeply rooted in post-pandemic memory making the future in the book not feel sleek or cold but realistic, careful, and consciously rebuilt.
Thematically, Spindrifts is rich. It explores climate repair, public health, disability, community responsibility, language, Indigenous sovereignty, racial history, family memory, and the ethics of deciding another person’s future “for the greater good.” The novel is particularly strong when Fania begins asking uncomfortable questions: Who gets to choose a person’s contribution? What happens to those labelled dangerous or abnormal? Can a society built for healing still carry hidden harm within its systems? These questions give the book its sharper edge beneath its utopian surface.
That said, this is a slow and very reflective novel. Readers looking for fast-paced science fiction, action, or a tightly plotted dystopian adventure may find the early chapters slow and heavily domestic. The book spends a great deal of time on conversations, family dynamics, memories, explanations of social systems, and emotional processing. At times, the exposition can feel dense, and the pacing may test readers who prefer immediate external conflict. However, the slower rhythm also allows the novel’s emotional and philosophical concerns to deepen gradually.
What I appreciated most is that Spindrifts refuses cynicism. It does not pretend that a better world would be simple, perfect, or free from moral compromise. Instead, it imagines a future where people have done enormous work to restore the planet, but where the next generation must still question, revise, and heal what their elders left unresolved. Fania’s emerging gifts, especially her ability to sense and heal others, become not only a speculative element but a metaphor for the book’s larger concern: true restoration requires seeing pain clearly, even when it implicates those we love.
Overall, Spindrifts is a intelligent, hopeful, and challenging novel. It is best suited for readers who enjoy character-driven speculative fiction, ecological futures, intergenerational stories, and books that use science fiction not merely to imagine technology, but to ask how people might live together with more care.
Author:Charleston Lim Release Date: 15 April 2026 Series: Genre: Historical Fiction Format: E-book Pages: 243 pages Publisher: – Blurb: History remembers the fall of Ferdinand Magellan, but it forgets the lives caught in his death’s shadow. 1521: The Defiance is not merely a retelling of the Battle of Mactan. It is a reckoning with how history is written, who is remembered, and whose stories endure. Drawing from Antonio Pigafetta’s chronicle, the only surviving firsthand account of Magellan’s final expedition, and grounded in precolonial Visayan culture, this novel explores the lives, fears, and convictions of those who stood on both sides of this historic encounter between islanders and empire. Written by a Filipino author rooted in the land where these events unfolded, 1521: The Defiance reimagines the human stories behind the clash, filling the silences between recorded facts with narrative, emotion, and cultural memory. It offers a perspective rarely centered in colonial histories, one that restores agency, dignity, and complexity to those long reduced to footnotes.
This is a story of belief and resistance, of men who sought to change the world, and of those who refused to let it be taken from them. “Tell me, Antonio. What will your pages call him if we cannot make him bend?” The Venetian hesitated, then gave a thin smile. “A rebel, perhaps. Or a heathen. Or…” He glanced at his parchment, as if unsure. “Or a fool who defied destiny.” A powerful tale of belief, resistance, and the cost of empire, this novel is for readers of immersive, multi-perspective historical fiction who seek stories that challenge inherited narratives.
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
1521: The Defiance by Charleston Lim is an exceptionally vivid and atmospheric work of Philippine historical fiction that revisits one of the most defining encounters in the archipelago’s early colonial history: Ferdinand Magellan’s arrival in Cebu and his fatal confrontation with Lapulapu on the shores of Mactan. Rather than treating the Battle of Mactan as a simple heroic episode or a dry historical event, author Lim reimagines it as a layered clash of ambition, faith, politics, survival, and cultural sovereignty.
The novel’s greatest strength lies in its shifting perspectives. Lapulapu is rendered not merely as a symbol of resistance, but as a leader, husband, mentor, and protector of land and people. His bond with Amihan gives the story emotional tenderness, while his relationship with Bulakna adds subtle strength to the narrative. Magellan, meanwhile, is not flattened into a villain. He is written as a man of faith, pride, conviction, and dangerous certainty; someone who genuinely believes he is fulfilling a divine mission, even when that mission begins to resemble conquest.
I especially appreciated how the novel handles Enrique and Pigafetta. Enrique becomes one of the book’s most compelling figures because he exists between worlds: enslaved yet indispensable, familiar with the islanders yet bound to the Spanish expedition, translator of empire yet increasingly aware of what his translations help unleash. Pigafetta, on the other hand, brings the perspective of the chronicler: observant, fascinated, devout, sometimes prejudiced, and constantly trying to make history legible through his own worldview. Through these two figures, the novel beautifully explores how history is not only lived, but recorded, interpreted, and sometimes distorted.
The worldbuilding is rich and immersive. Author Lim pays close attention to pre-colonial Visayan culture, and the detailing does not feel decorative, it helps restore depth and dignity to a world too often reduced to a footnote in colonial narratives. The descriptions of the mangroves, reefs, villages, feasts, rituals, and battle preparations give the novel a strong sensory presence.
The Battle of Mactan itself is one of the most powerful sections of the book. Author Lim builds it carefully, showing both strategy and emotion. The death of Amihan gives the battle an intimate heartbreak, preventing it from becoming merely a triumphant historical set-piece. Victory here is meaningful, but never bloodless.
That said, the novel is at its strongest when it stays close to character and cultural tension. Some passages, especially those dealing with religious exposition and political explanation, can feel slightly heavy, and readers who prefer faster-paced historical fiction may find the build-up deliberate. However, this slower pace also allows the author to establish the stakes with care, making the eventual confrontation feel earned rather than rushed.
Overall, 1521: The Defiance is a thoughtful, well-researched, and emotionally resonant historical novel. It honours Lapulapu’s defiance while also examining the complicated motives of Magellan, Humabon, Enrique, Pigafetta, and the many people caught between faith, power, survival, and loyalty.
Author:D Reign Release Date: 12 December 2025 Series: Genre: Romance Format: E-book Pages: 81 pages Publisher: Blurb: Isn’t that what they say happens when you try to forget something so poignant, so soul rendering? you need to run, hide and seek solace. Well, that was me, where I am right now. Maybe I should start from the beginning and tell my story from all perspectives, who was wrong, who was right. It doesn’t matter really in the grand scheme of things, as I lost the one thing that kept me sabe. The love of my life. Now I question how do I get him back. Come and delve in the lives of Dale and Selene and modern love story set in reality with love and lost and reformed again into something new but you follow the journey of the trials and tribulations that got them there.
Review
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
Fade to Black by D. Reign is an emotionally charged second-chance romance about first love, betrayal, misunderstanding, motherhood, and the painful consequences of words left unsaid. The story follows Selene and Dale, childhood friends turned lovers, who are separated by a devastating misunderstanding just as Selene discovers she is pregnant. Years later, Selene finally reaches out to Dale because their eight-year-old son, Beau, wants to know his father.
The strongest emotional thread in the book is the Selene-Dale-Beau dynamic. Beau’s presence gives the story its real tenderness and urgency. Selene is not simply trying to revisit an old romance; she is trying to do right by her child. Dale’s reaction to discovering he has a son is one of the more affecting parts of the story, especially when he looks through the book Selene has prepared for him, filled with moments from her pregnancy and Beau’s childhood. That scene gives the romance a deeper emotional weight because Dale is not only confronting lost love, but lost time.
Selene and Dale’s relationship is written with heat, intensity, and unfinished longing. Their chemistry is immediate, sometimes overwhelming, and the narrative leans heavily into the physical and emotional pull between them. The book captures that dangerous space where old love has not died, but neither has old hurt. The eventual revelation gives the central conflict its shape and explains how two people who loved each other so deeply could lose years of their lives to silence and assumption.
That said, the book does have rough edges. The prose is highly direct and emotionally repetitive in places, and the shifting point of view can sometimes feel abrupt. The story also resolves rather quickly after the truth comes out, especially considering the years of hurt, the existence of Malorie, and Dale’s mother’s long-standing hostility toward Selene. A slower final section might have allowed the emotional reconciliation to breathe more fully. The sensual scenes are also very explicit, so readers who prefer softer or more restrained romance should be aware of that.
Still, Fade to Black has a strong emotional core. At its heart, this is a story about two people who were young, wounded, and misled, and who finally get a chance to reclaim the life that was interrupted. Overall, Fade to Black is a passionate, dramatic, and heartfelt second-chance romance.
Author:Wendy Swift Release Date: 21 April 2026 Series: Genre: Memoir Format: E-book Pages: 296 pages Publisher: Blurb: When Wendy Swift discovers a letter demanding nearly two million dollars in restitution from her attorney husband, she realizes that her life as a suburban stay-at-home mother has been built on illusion. Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, she believed the quintessential dream life she shared with her husband and three daughters was secure and enduring. A Dream Life traces Swift’s search for validation through marriage, motherhood, and social mobility, and the unraveling that follows. After her husband begins his incarceration in the 1990s, Swift becomes solely responsible for supporting her three young daughters as they navigate loss, shame, and uncertainty. Her path forward is uneven and hard-won, revealing resilience, reflection, and growth, as well as the perils of blind materialism. This powerful memoir illuminates the complex challenges families face when confronted with addiction, mental illness, and incarceration. Swift blends unflinching truth-telling with wry self-reflection, awakening readers to the consequences of denial and the restorative power of self-possession. A Dream Life ultimately affirms that anyone can unknowingly fall prey to false beliefs, but once the truth is revealed and the fear of dislocation and upheaval is faced, renewal and strength can emerge.
“A brutally honest portrayal of the emotional, psychological, and economic struggle to keep one’s family intact while enduring the acute financial betrayal and emotional abuse of a rogue spouse.” — Lisa Lawler, Founder of The White-Collar Wives Project
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
A Dream Life by Wendy Swift is an intimate, unflinchingly honest memoir about the slow collapse of a marriage built on hope, denial, love, dependency, and illusion. The story begins as a story of young romance and college life, marriage, motherhood, a home in Connecticut, children, friendships, community, and the promise of an upwardly mobile life, gradually reveals itself as something much darker: a portrait of addiction, financial betrayal, emotional evasion, and the painful awakening of a woman who has spent years believing that if she simply holds everything together, the dream might still survive.
What makes this memoir so compelling is author Swift’s refusal to write from a place of easy hindsight. She does not present her younger self as foolish, nor does she flatten Danny into a simple villain. Instead, she reconstructs the emotional logic of each stage of her life with remarkable clarity: the longing to be loved, the desire for a beautiful family, the seduction of status and suburban stability, the acceptance of warning signs, and the slow, almost imperceptible way denial becomes a survival mechanism. The result is a layered examination of how people participate in their own illusions before they are ready to see the truth.
Author Swift’s prose is one of the strongest aspects of the book. It is direct, reflective, and often devastating. She has a gift for grounding emotional complexity in physical detail that accumulate until the reader understands that the “dream life” was never one single lie, but a carefully maintained arrangement of small evasions, financial improvisations, emotional silences, and desperate hopes.
The memoir is especially powerful in its treatment of motherhood. Author Swift’s love for her daughters is the emotional spine of the book, and her struggle is not only to survive Danny’s choices, but to protect the lives of Julia, Erika, and Alli from being destroyed by them. There is no easy heroism here. She is exhausted, afraid, sometimes complicit, sometimes angry, sometimes paralysed, but always trying to preserve some form of safety and normalcy for her children. That honesty makes the memoir far more moving than a polished story of triumph would have been.
The book also offers a sharp portrait of financial abuse and white-collar crime from the inside of the family home. What is chilling is not only the scale of Danny’s betrayals, but the ordinariness surrounding them: school events, dinners, synagogue services, house repairs, tennis lessons, grocery shopping, and children’s routines continue while the foundations of the family are quietly eroding. Swift captures how economic deception does not merely damage bank accounts; it damages trust, identity, self-worth, and one’s sense of reality.
If I had one reservation, it is that the memoir is expansive and sometimes deeply detailed, particularly in the early domestic sections. Some readers may feel the pace is slow before the full magnitude of the crisis emerges. However, I also think this gradualness is part of the book’s design. Swift wants us to understand the dream before we witness its destruction. Without the ordinary texture of the marriage, the suburban life, the friendships, and the children’s childhoods, the later collapse would not carry the same emotional weight.
Ultimately, A Dream Life is a brave, intelligent, and deeply humane memoir about illusion, betrayal, self-forgiveness, and the long road back to agency. It is not only about losing a dream life; it is about learning to distinguish between the life one performs, the life one endures, and the life one finally chooses. Painful, reflective, and empowering, this is a memoir that will resonate especially with readers interested in women’s lives, marriage, addiction, financial betrayal, and the difficult work of reclaiming the self.
Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuring author A. B. Acharya for his latest release, Red Sky.
About The Author
A.B. Acharya
I am a neurologist and writer living in St. Louis, Missouri. I specialize in treating migraine headaches, a job that has taught me to listen carefully, notice patterns, and take people’s stories seriously. These skills prove just as useful on the page as in the clinic. My parents are from Kolkata, India, and I am Bengali by heritage. I understand Bangla well, but my spoken version is atrocious, so I mostly stick to English. My wife and I are both neurologists. I’m very lucky to be married to my best friend, who is also an excellent editor and proofreader. We have two adult daughters out in the world doing great things, along with two dogs, a rotating cast of fish, and a guinea pig who has outlasted expectations. When I’m not working or writing, I like to run, play guitar, and read (but not at the same time). My literary preferences lie firmly in nineteenth-century Russian novels, with War and Peace at the top of the list. My fiction explores ambition, power, and the unintended consequences of human ingenuity. If you’d like to learn more about why I wrote Red Sky, you can find essays and reflections on my Substack.
He came to fix the world’s most dangerous drug. The drug had other plans.
Narin Roy is writing his confession in a police interrogation room, and the only thing keeping him calm is the drug that started it all. Months earlier, he was a disgraced scientist with one shot left: a job at Harvester Pharmaceuticals, developing a therapeutic version of DMTA, the compound behind Red Sky, the street drug that can make you brilliant but occasionally turns you into a killer. Narin has a secret weapon: a formula on a flash drive that could crack the problem no one else has solved. All he has to do is survive Harvester long enough to use it. But Harvester is not what it appears. Behind its gleaming façade, Narin finds himself caught between a charismatic lawyer whose charm conceals a ruthless agenda, an embittered scientist who built the company and may be destroying it, and a project so classified that its true purpose makes his blood run cold. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure haunts his dreams, a desert prince who trains him for a battle he doesn’t yet understand. As the weeks pass, Narin can’t tell anymore where the science ends and his unraveling begins. The voices may be hallucinations. The visions may be warnings. And the confession he’s writing, the one that brought him to this cold interrogation room, may not end the way anyone expects. Red Sky is a propulsive psychological thriller for readers who like their conspiracies dark, their narrators unreliable, and their endings earned.
If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com
Author:Knut-Erland Berglund Release Date: 2.06.2025 Series: Genre: Non-fiction, Business studies Format: E-book Pages: 243 pages Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand Blurb: CSR History and Practice: A Study of Swedish Large-Sclae Entrepreneurship at the Company Level Circa 1940 – 2010.
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
CSR History and Practice by Knut-Erland Berglund is a thoughtful, research-driven exploration of Corporate Social Responsibility through the historical practices of three major Swedish companies: Ericsson, Trelleborg, and Vattenfall. Rather than treating CSR as a modern corporate buzzword, Berglund traces its roots across decades of business activity, showing how companies engaged with employees, communities, culture, education, welfare, environmental issues, and social responsibility long before the term CSR became widely formalised.
In this book, author Berglund does not simply explain CSR as a theoretical concept, he studies how responsibility appeared in practice through company magazines, archival material, personnel policies, sponsorships, environmental initiatives, aid work, corporate defence structures, health programmes, gender equality efforts, and codes of conduct. This makes the book especially useful for readers interested in economic history, business ethics, Scandinavian corporate culture, and the evolution of sustainability thinking.
The strongest aspect of the book is its ability to demonstrate continuity. CSR is often discussed as though it emerged suddenly in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century, but author Berglund shows that many of its impulses like care for workers, cultural patronage, educational scholarships, environmental awareness, and social engagement, were already present in earlier corporate behaviour. Ericsson, Trelleborg, and Vattenfall each become case studies in how Swedish companies negotiated their responsibilities not only to shareholders, but also to employees, society, the state, and the environment.
I particularly appreciated the sections on personnel policy and environmental work, as they reveal how broad the idea of corporate responsibility can be. The book looks at employee share programmes, ceremonies, health strategies, workplace equality, environmental reporting, pollution reduction, energy-saving initiatives, recycling, and institutional responses to social expectations. These details give the study texture and prevent it from becoming purely abstract.
That said, the book is academic in tone and structure, so readers expecting a light business read may find it heavy. The prose is clear enough, but the organisation is very research-oriented, and some sections read more like a historical report. There are also places where the material could have benefited from a stronger interpretive thread to help non-specialist readers connect the many examples more fluidly.
Still, CSR History and Practice succeeds as a serious and valuable contribution to CSR history. Its greatest strength lies in showing that corporate responsibility is not merely a branding exercise or a recent sustainability trend, but part of a much longer conversation about the role of business in society. For readers interested in CSR, sustainability, business history, Swedish industry, or the ethical responsibilities of corporations, this is a focused and worthwhile read.
Author:B. Walker Release Date: 30 May 2025 Series: The Unnamed (Book #1) Genre: Dark Fantasy, Coming-of-Age Format: E-book Pages: 463 pages Publisher: Killbot Factory Blurb: The Forest Plain will not allow men to settle, farm, or cross with armies. Men of the west dream of breaking its curse, but doing so will destroy the way of life of the nomadic people who live there. In Grayhaven, they say, “Glory to Ahur and to the Plain,” because it has kept them safe for five centuries and has allowed them to grow into the wealthiest nation on the continent. COLLIER TRUIT is from Grayhaven, but flees after his grandfather’s failed political machinations led to the murder of their family. He is part Yurbo, through his father and seeks out his father’s clan, determined to win their help in retaking his ancestral titles. While in the plain, Collier faces mounting threats with his Yurbo hosts. One threat is the fearsome wolfmen known as Lyken, themselves refugees from colonized homeland. This includes the drunk and shaggy ARNAK, and his friend, the troubadour MOJAG. They flee for Grayhaven but run into the Yurbo. The greater threat is from the west. There, ASHLYN, an acolyte of the order of mages known as the Bruj, heads into the Forest Plain to complete her prophesized destiny to break the Plain’s curse.
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Spirit of the Plain by B. Walker is an ambitious, politically charged dark epic fantasy that opens with violence, exile, and the unsettling sense that every civilisation in this world is standing on old blood. Set across Nordunia and the mysterious Forest Plain, the novel follows three major narrative strands: Collier, a fallen noble heir forced into the Yurbo world after his family is destroyed; Arnak, a lykan caught in the brutal social collapse of Hearthsport; and Ashlyn, a young bruj acolyte drawn into prophecy, power, and the terrifying truth of Allouhuille. The included maps of Nordunia and the Forest Plain immediately signal the scale of the world author Walker is building.
What I admired most is the sheer texture of the worldbuilding. This is not a decorative fantasy world with invented names scattered over familiar terrain; it feels culturally, politically, and linguistically layered. The Yurbo, the lyken, the bruj, the Spirit Talkers, the phaye, Grayhaven, Hearthsport, Stilleon, Lachland, and the Forest Plain all carry different systems of belief, prejudice, power, and survival. The book is especially strong when it explores how cultures misunderstand one another, and how those misunderstandings become fear, cruelty, colonisation, rebellion, and violence.
Thematically, Spirit of the Plain is rich. It examines exile, racial hatred, inherited violence, spiritual power, political legitimacy, and the dangerous hunger to reclaim what has been lost. It is also deeply interested in names: who has one, who is denied one, and what power naming gives or withholds. The title The Unnamed speaks directly to the Yurbo, to identity, to belonging, and to the novel’s larger concern with people who exist outside the official language of empires.
This book is, however, a demanding read. It is long, dense, and often unrelenting. Author Walker asks the reader to absorb a great deal: invented terminology, multiple cultures, political histories, magical systems, religious structures, and shifting points of view. At times, the pacing can feel heavy, especially when the worldbuilding and dialogue slow the forward motion of the plot. Some readers may also find the violence and brutality difficult; the novel does not soften the cost of war, prejudice, captivity, or survival.
Still, even when the book sprawls, it rarely feels careless. There is a clear intelligence behind the construction of this world, and the emotional stakes deepen as the separate storylines begin to feel part of a much larger design. By the final stretch the novel widens into something darker and more mythic than its already intense beginning suggests.
Overall, Spirit of the Plain is a bold, intricate, and morally serious fantasy debut. It may not be a light or easy read, but it rewards patience with a world that feels realistic, wounded, and politically alive. Readers who enjoy complex epic fantasy with cultural depth, morally complex characters, political intrigue, and mythic magic will find a great deal to admire here.
Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuring A. B. Acharya for their latest release, Red Sky.
Book: Red Sky: A Biotech Thriller Author: A. B. Acharya Publication Date: 3/2/2026 Pages: 334 Genre: Thriller, Suspense Available Formats: Ebook and Paperback For Readers who Enjoyed: Michael Crichton and Robin Cook
About the Book
He came to fix the world’s most dangerous drug. The drug had other plans.
Narin Roy is writing his confession in a police interrogation room, and the only thing keeping him calm is the drug that started it all. Months earlier, he was a disgraced scientist with one shot left: a job at Harvester Pharmaceuticals, developing a therapeutic version of DMTA, the compound behind Red Sky, the street drug that can make you brilliant but occasionally turns you into a killer. Narin has a secret weapon: a formula on a flash drive that could crack the problem no one else has solved. All he has to do is survive Harvester long enough to use it. But Harvester is not what it appears. Behind its gleaming façade, Narin finds himself caught between a charismatic lawyer whose charm conceals a ruthless agenda, an embittered scientist who built the company and may be destroying it, and a project so classified that its true purpose makes his blood run cold. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure haunts his dreams, a desert prince who trains him for a battle he doesn’t yet understand. As the weeks pass, Narin can’t tell anymore where the science ends and his unraveling begins. The voices may be hallucinations. The visions may be warnings. And the confession he’s writing, the one that brought him to this cold interrogation room, may not end the way anyone expects. Red Sky is a propulsive psychological thriller for readers who like their conspiracies dark, their narrators unreliable, and their endings earned.
I am a neurologist and writer living in St. Louis, Missouri. I specialize in treating migraine headaches, a job that has taught me to listen carefully, notice patterns, and take people’s stories seriously. These skills prove just as useful on the page as in the clinic. My parents are from Kolkata, India, and I am Bengali by heritage. I understand Bangla well, but my spoken version is atrocious, so I mostly stick to English. My wife and I are both neurologists. I’m very lucky to be married to my best friend, who is also an excellent editor and proofreader. We have two adult daughters out in the world doing great things, along with two dogs, a rotating cast of fish, and a guinea pig who has outlasted expectations. When I’m not working or writing, I like to run, play guitar, and read (but not at the same time). My literary preferences lie firmly in nineteenth-century Russian novels, with War and Peace at the top of the list. My fiction explores ambition, power, and the unintended consequences of human ingenuity. If you’d like to learn more about why I wrote Red Sky, you can find essays and reflections on my Substack.
If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com
Author:Professor Lazurus Release Date: 13 November 2023 Series: Genre: Science-Fiction Graphic Novel Format: E-book Pages: 45 pages Publisher: Blurb: Unleash your imagination with “The Agent Syndicate”, an exhilarating tale set in the Matrix-Universe during the purge. Authored by Professor Lazurus and adapted from the popular web comic, this gripping narrative follows the journey of 7 chosen agents entrusted with a mission of unparalleled significance. These agents are faced with a harrowing choice: take the black pill or risk deletion, all in the pursuit of safeguarding the future. Dive headfirst into a world where reality blurs and digital realms collide, as these elite agents navigate the treacherous landscape of a system preparing to be reset. With each decision, they walk the fine line between rebellion and conformity.
“The Agent Syndicate” seamlessly weaves together elements of action, suspense, and philosophical intrigue, offering readers a front-row seat to an epic struggle for control, freedom, and the ultimate truth. This comic/script book promises to deliver a gripping narrative that will leave you questioning the very fabric of reality.
Join us on an electrifying journey through the digital corridors of the system, where reality is a construct waiting to be shattered, and the agents of “The Agent Syndicate” hold the key to an astonishing revelation. Will they succeed in their mission, or will the new regime prove too powerful? Find out in this must-read comic/script that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page. Unlock the origins of the Agent Syndicate and explore the purge in this thrilling adventure.
Get your copy of “The Agent Syndicate” now and prepare to venture into a world where the line between reality and illusion is blurred by the ultimate pursuit for survival.
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
The Agent Syndicate: Volume 001 by Professor Lazurus is a sharp, stylish, Matrix-inspired graphic novel that places its focus not on humans fighting the system, but on the programs left scrambling when the system itself begins to fracture. This first volume works as a high-concept, lore-heavy action piece built around Agents, exiles, reconfiguration, machine politics, and the uneasy emergence of free will inside beings originally designed for obedience.
The story opens with Agent Vasquez entering the Chateau to confront Cain, and this immediately sets the tone: tense, confrontational, visually moody, and steeped in existing Matrix mythology. The werewolf transformation, the use of silver, the White Hallways, the Merovingian, the Architect, Persephone, Agent Smith, and the Analyst all place the comic firmly within a familiar universe, but the perspective feels fresh because the emotional centre belongs to the Agents themselves. These are not faceless system enforcers anymore; they are beginning to question loyalty, survival, purpose, and even belief.
What I found most interesting is the way the comic reframes the Architect. He is still cold, precise, and intellectually superior, but here he also becomes strangely paternal. His address to the Agents, offering them the black pill and therefore a form of free will, is one of the strongest moments in the volume. The Agents’ transformation into the black-shirt-and-red-tie Syndicate gives the story its identity: they are still dangerous, efficient, and programmed for order, but now they are also exiles trying to survive a purge.
Visually, the work has a strong digital-anime energy. The green-black palette, leather coats, sunglasses, weaponry, club lighting, and monochrome action panels all echo the cyberpunk aesthetic of the Matrix universe while leaning into a slick fan-comic style.
That said, this is very much a first-volume setup. Readers unfamiliar with Matrix mythology may find the references dense, and the pacing moves quickly from one lore-heavy development to another. The plot sometimes assumes prior knowledge of characters, constructs, and system politics, so it may work best for readers who already enjoy the Matrix universe and want an expanded, Agent-centred storyline. The text-heavy layout also occasionally competes with the visual storytelling, though the art still carries a strong sense of atmosphere and movement.
Overall, The Agent Syndicate: Volume 001 is an ambitious and energetic graphic novel that expands familiar Matrix themes through a compelling new angle. Stylish, lore-rich, and full of potential, this first volume sets up an intriguing conflict that should appeal strongly to Matrix fans and readers who enjoy cyberpunk, system rebellions, and morally complicated artificial beings.
Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuring Lord Hugo Dastardly for their latest release, The Orange Man.
Book: The Orange Man and Me Author: Lord Hugo Dastardly Publication Date: April 17, 2026 Pages: 225 Genre: Political satire Available Formats: Ebook (including Kindle Unlimited) and paperback For Readers who Enjoyed:Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut; Thank You for Smoking by Christopher Buckley; Primary Colors by Joe Klein; Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
About the Book
She gave him everything. He gave her January 6.
What would you do if you caught the eye of the most powerful man in the world?
His dealmaking skills are legendary. His prowess with the ladies is well-documented in court filings. His hair is definitely real. He’s the President of the United States of America.
Once she’s been with him, how could any other man ever compete?
In this political novel by brilliant satirist Lord Hugo Dastardly, she’ll have a front-row seat to the most chaotic administration in US history. It’s guaranteed to get MAGA all hot and bothered, even more than AI porn bots or the Beetlejuice musical.
Born Jim Don Bowman in the Appalachian rust belt community of Jickensburgh, Kentucky, Lord Hugo Dastardly witnessed firsthand how poor white folks could get addicted to drugs—a true elegy of hillbilly proportions.
If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com
Author:Clark Gillian Van Herrewege Release Date: 4 May 2026 Series: Genre: Thriller, Mystery Format: E-book Pages: 210 pages Publisher: Brave New Books Blurb: One billionaire. One Euro. One secret that could kill. When eccentric billionaire Johan Paepe is found dead in his Brussels mansion, the reading of his will turns into a high-stakes psychological game. Notary Benjamin De Walters is tasked with a bizarre addendum: a billion-euro fortune has been hidden for a decade, and the murderous secret heir is sitting right in his office amongst Johan’s other next of kin. As Detective Van Der smet deploys cutting-edge AI facial recognition to hunt for a motive among the family members, Ben must rely on his father’s old-world lessons in observation and human nature. In a climate of digital surveillance and political tension, can a notary’s intuition outpace a police algorithm? A contemporary tribute to the Golden Age of detective fiction, ‘Who Wants To Be A Billionaire’ explores the thin line between the logic of technology and the chaotic mess of family ties.
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Who Wants to Be a Billionaire? by Clark Gillian Van Herrewege is a wonderfully unusual mystery novel built around inheritance, suspicion, family resentment, AI-assisted policing, and one very observant Brussels notary named KarelBenjamin De Walters. The premise is instantly intriguing: billionaire author Johan Paepe dies under suspicious circumstances just after changing his will, and his possible heirs are gathered together to discover that one among them may already have secretly inherited his fortune years ago. What follows is part locked-room mystery, part family drama, part satire of wealth, and part philosophical meditation on truth, storytelling, and individual and social actions.
What I enjoyed most is the narrative voice as Benjamin De Walters is not a typical detective figure; he is formal, digressive, cultured, legally precise, and frequently distracted by cinema, memory, grief, and moral reflection. His long meditations on Hitchcock, Belgian law, inheritance structures, and social conduct give the book a distinct personality. At times, these digressions slow the plot, but they also make the novel feel unlike a standard commercial mystery. The book is less interested in rushing toward a revelation and more interested in observing how people reveal themselves under pressure.
The central mystery is deliciously theatrical. The Paepe family members are trapped not only by the possibility of murder, but by money itself: the inheritance becomes a moral test, a psychological trap, and a mirror held up to every old grievance in the room. Pieter, Jochen, Céline, Kenny, Joyabel, Layla, Jean-Baptiste, Nele, and Brenda each bring their own history of need, bitterness, injury, or secrecy, and the AI surveillance system adds a sharp contemporary edge to the proceedings.
That said, this is not a lean mystery. The prose is intentionally expansive, and readers who prefer tight, fast-paced thrillers may find the digressions excessive. The Hitchcock commentary, historical asides, and legal-financial explanations are interesting, but they sometimes compete with the immediacy of the investigation. The novel also moves into increasingly strange and metaphysical territory later on, which may divide readers depending on how much they enjoy genre-blending.
Still, Who Wants to Be a Billionaire? is memorable because it refuses to be ordinary. It is witty, eccentric, dramatic, and unexpectedly tender, especially in the epilogue, where the story closes not with spectacle but with companionship, grief, and the image of Brenda, Benjamin, and Ariadne walking through the purple sea of Hallerbos.
Author:John Burt Release Date: 19 January 2026 Series: Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction Format: E-book Pages: 332 pages Publisher: Press Americana Blurb: A Moment’s Surrender follows freshman writing instructor Paul Bishop in the aftermath of the murder of his former best friend, the renowned poet Tom Corbin. Haunted by guilt and bound by a devastating secret, Paul takes it upon himself to care for Tom’s terminally ill widow, Susan. But the truth he withholds — that Tom had planned to leave Susan for another woman, Paul’s own long-ago lover Rachel Lake — draws Paul into a painful triangle of loyalty, betrayal, and unresolved desire. Caught between the two women, Paul must navigate a web of grief and deception that threatens to undo them all.
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
A Moment’s Surrender by John Burt is a literary novel of grief, guilt, desire, betrayal, and the strange moral afterlife of love. The story follows Paul Bishop, a freshman writing instructor whose former best friend, celebrated poet Tom Corbin, is murdered shortly after visiting him in Reno. But the murder is only the event that cracks the surface. Beneath it lies a far more intimate and devastating web: Tom had planned to leave his terminally ill wife Susan for Rachel Lake, Paul’s former lover, and Paul becomes the keeper of this secret even as he grows increasingly bound to Susan and her young son, Jack.
What makes this novel so compelling is its psychological precision. Author Burt is not writing a conventional murder mystery, though the book does contain a murder, an investigation, and the consequences of a violent death. The real mystery here is emotional: what do we owe the dead, what do we owe the living, and how much truth can love bear before it collapses under its own weight? Paul is a fascinatingly flawed protagonist who is passive, guilt-ridden, evasive, intellectually sharp but morally hesitant. His instinct is often to protect people through concealment, yet every concealment draws him deeper into the very harm he wants to avoid.
The strongest parts of the novel are its character dynamics. Susan is beautifully rendered: grieving, exhausted, morally serious, vulnerable without being weak, and heroic in the way she continues to care for Jack while facing her own illness and loss. Rachel brings a darker, more volatile energy into the book and Tom, though dead early in the novel, dominates the narrative like a gravitational force.
Author Burt’s prose is dense, reflective, and literary. The novel is full of meditations on poetry, faith, moral failure, academia, desire, and mortality and readers who enjoy literary fiction that thinks deeply about relationships will find the book richly rewarding.
What I admired most is that A Moment’s Surrender refuses easy moral categories. Nobody here is simply good or bad, betrayed or betrayer, coward or victim. Love is shown as something that can wound, distort, redeem, and trap people all at once. The novel understands that grief does not purify the dead, guilt does not necessarily make us truthful, and compassion is often tangled with selfishness.
Overall, A Moment’s Surrender is a thoughtful, emotionally intricate, and intellectually serious debut. It is not a light read, but it is a rewarding one; especially for readers drawn to literary fiction about grief, moral ambiguity, failed love, and the difficult grace of continuing after irreparable damage.
Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuring author Knut-Erland Berglundfor his latest release, CSR History and Practice: A Study on Swedish Large-Scale Entrepreneurship at the Company Level.
Book: CSR History and Practice: A study of Swedish Large Scale Entrepreneurship at the Company Level Circa 1940 – 2010 Author: Knut-Erland Berglund Publication Date: 02.06.25 Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand Pages: 243 Genre: Non-fiction, Business studies Available Formats: eBook, Paperback
About the Book
CSR History and Practice: A Study of Swedish Large-Sclae Entrepreneurship at the Company Level Circa 1940 – 2010.
Social scientist with project management experience and a strong interest in GIS. Used to being involved in, running projects and organizing my work. Specialized in social innovation, corporate responsibility (CSR & Sustainability) and sustainable development. Several experiences as a lecturer and presenter of research at international conferences.
If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com
Author:Travis Peterson Release Date: 31 March 2026 Series: Genre: Dystopian, Post-Aplocalypse, Sci-Fi Format: E-book Pages: 120 pages Publisher: – Blurb: A rogue planet is coming. Humanity’s last city has a plan. You won’t like it. Pete wakes in POD 217 with blood on his face and no memory of yesterday. The Last Great City is clean, pleasurable, and perfectly controlled — as long as its citizens follow the cycle. Reset. Comply. Repeat. Pete keeps failing the reset. Somewhere in the city, a woman named Marla is looking for him. Somewhere in the past, two scientists just watched something enormous pass in front of Betelgeuse. And somewhere at the edge of a dying wasteland, a cybernaut older than civilization is sitting under a cherry tree, watching the feral descendants of humanity dance under a dying star.
Salvation Reigned moves across fractured time and colliding perspectives — the scientists who saw it coming, the city that chose control over truth, the lovers whose bond survives every attempt to erase it, and the machine left behind to witness what persists when everything else is gone. Raw. Nonlinear. Uncompromising. This is not a story about heroes. It is a story about what love, memory, and consciousness do when a system tries to delete them. Adult content: extreme language and graphic violence. For fans of Philip K. Dick, Chuck Palahniuk, and Jeff VanderMeer.
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Salvation Reigned by Travis James Peterson is a strange, abrasive, darkly comic work of dystopian science fiction that reads like the end of the world filtered through panic, intoxication, political theatre, body horror, and cosmic absurdity. The novel begins with Pete, a scientist working on a singularity weapon to stop Nyx, a rogue planet on a collision course with Earth, but very quickly expands into something much wilder: a collapsing civilisation, performative leadership, feral evolution, cybernauts, strongholds, memory cycles, and the unsettling question of whether “saving humanity” means anything if humanity has already lost itself.
What immediately stands out is the book’s voice. It is raw, fragmented, profane, hallucinatory, and deliberately excessive. Author Peterson writes in short bursts that feel part fever dream, part stand-up routine, and part apocalypse sermon. This style will not be for everyone, but it gives the novel a distinctive pulse. The political satire is especially sharp in the early sections, where the President, his cabinet, and the media apparatus respond to planetary extinction with ego, spectacle, branding, and grotesque public performance. The discovery of Nyx by Gilbert and Lewis, followed by the government’s attempt to control the narrative, sets the tone beautifully: this is a world too stupid, vain, and overstimulated to face its own ending with dignity.
Thematically, the novel is surprisingly rich beneath its chaotic surface. It is deeply concerned with survival, control, memory, bodily autonomy, propaganda, technological salvation, and our recurring instinct to turn even catastrophe into hierarchy. That said, Salvation Reigned is not a smooth or conventionally polished read. Its intensity can become overwhelming, and the constant barrage of profanity, sexual imagery, violence, and surreal humour may exhaust some readers. The prose is intentionally jagged, but there are moments where that jaggedness blurs clarity. Readers looking for traditional pacing, clean exposition, or restrained dystopian storytelling may struggle with it. However, readers who enjoy experimental speculative fiction, satirical apocalypse narratives, and fiction that is willing to be ugly, funny, clever, and uncomfortable all at once may find this book fascinating.
Overall, Salvation Reigned is bold, chaotic, and extremely strange in a way that feels entirely intentional. It is not simply about stopping the apocalypse; it is about what people do when extinction becomes a certainty, and how every system (political, technological, spiritual, and biological) tries to claim the right to define survival. It is messy, provocative, and often grotesque, but it also has flashes of real beauty, especially in its final meditation on memory, destruction, and the life that continues after us.
Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuring author Charleston Lim for their latest release, 1521: The Defiance.
Book: 1521: The Defiance Author: Charleston Lim Publication Date: April 15, 2026 Publisher: – Pages: 243 Genre: Historical Fiction Available Formats: eBook, Paperback, Hardbound For Readers who Enjoyed: Historical Fiction stories
About the Book
History remembers the fall of Ferdinand Magellan, but it forgets the lives caught in his death’s shadow.
1521: The Defiance is not merely a retelling of the Battle of Mactan. It is a reckoning with how history is written, who is remembered, and whose stories endure.
Drawing from Antonio Pigafetta’s chronicle, the only surviving firsthand account of Magellan’s final expedition, and grounded in precolonial Visayan culture, this novel explores the lives, fears, and convictions of those who stood on both sides of this historic encounter between islanders and empire.
Written by a Filipino author rooted in the land where these events unfolded, 1521: The Defiance reimagines the human stories behind the clash, filling the silences between recorded facts with narrative, emotion, and cultural memory. It offers a perspective rarely centered in colonial histories, one that restores agency, dignity, and complexity to those long reduced to footnotes.
This is a story of belief and resistance, of men who sought to change the world, and of those who refused to let it be taken from them.
“Tell me, Antonio. What will your pages call him if we cannot make him bend?” The Venetian hesitated, then gave a thin smile. “A rebel, perhaps. Or a heathen. Or…” He glanced at his parchment, as if unsure. “Or a fool who defied destiny.”
Charleston Lim is a Filipino author known for his multi-genre work, including science fiction and historical fiction novels. Based on the island of Cebu in the Philippines, he identifies as a science fiction nerd and draws inspiration from complex themes like quantum physics, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, and history.
If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com
Author:Peter Mattson Release Date: 20 February 2026 Series: Genre: Political Dystopian, Sci-Fi, Thriller Format: E-book Pages: 288 pages Publisher: – Blurb: In the dystopian nation of Harkiem, no one questions the system—until journalist Jones Torren investigates the death of thirteen-year-old Jack Ovens and uncovers a conspiracy that could cost him his life. Jack Ovens has always been labeled a troublemaker. After a series of mistakes, he is sent to the Refinement Centre—a government-run program promising discipline, reform, and job training. What Jack encounters is a system that favors some boys while quietly keeping others down.
Months later, journalist Jones Torren is assigned to cover Jack’s death. What begins as a routine human-interest story quickly unravels into something far more disturbing. Records are missing. Testimonies don’t align. And more families are coming forward with the same quiet, devastating truth: their sons never came home. As Jones digs deeper, he uncovers a hidden extension of the program, The Ranch. What happens there isn’t reform. It’s something worse. Exposing The Ranch could topple a nation. It could also get Jones killed. The Ranch is a gripping dystopian novel that asks the question: What if the system meant to save society is quietly destroying its children? The Ranch explores what happens when authority goes unquestioned, and government policies operate in the shadows, revealing a chilling world where the perfect society comes at a devastating human cost.
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
The Ranch: For The Betterment of Humanity by Peter Mattson is a dystopian novel that begins with a deceptively familiar problem of a troubled schoolboy, a worried mother, and a system that claims it can “fix” difficult children, before expanding into a much darker examination of state control, institutional discipline, social engineering, and the terrifying ease with which cruelty can be repackaged as reform. The story moves between Jack Ovens’s past, as he is pulled deeper into the Refinement Centre and later the Ranch, and a present-day investigation into what really happened to him.
What works best in the novel is its central idea. Mattson builds a society where children who are deemed disruptive, unproductive, or dangerous are processed through systems designed to make them useful. The Refinement Centre and the Ranch are chilling because they are not presented as openly villainous at first; they are wrapped in the language of discipline, productivity, safety, and “betterment.” This is where the book’s strongest dystopian force lies: in showing how authoritarian systems often survive by convincing ordinary people that suffering is necessary for order.
Jack is an effective emotional anchor because he is not written as a perfect victim. He is impulsive, angry, flawed, and often difficult, which makes the system’s response to him even more unsettling. That said, The Ranch is also a very idea-driven novel, and at times the themes can overtake the characters. Some sections lean heavily into explanation, policy, and institutional mechanics, which may slow the pace for readers looking for a tighter thriller-like dystopian narrative. The novel is strongest when it dramatises its ideas through Jack’s fear, resistance, isolation, and the brutal logic of the Ranch; it is slightly less effective when it pauses to explain the system too directly. A firmer editorial hand could have sharpened some transitions and given the emotional beats more room to breathe.
Still, the book’s ambition is clear and admirable. This is not a dystopia built only for spectacle; it is built around a moral argument. Author Mattson is interested in how societies justify sacrifice, governments hide violence behind policy, and how easily children can become raw material for ideological experiments. The title’s promise of “betterment” becomes darker with every chapter, because the reader understands that the real question is not whether the system works, but what kind of people it is trying to create.
Overall, The Ranch is a thoughtful, unsettling dystopian novel with strong social commentary and a disturbing institutional core. It may be uneven in pacing, but its premise, moral urgency, and critique of forced reform make it a compelling read for readers who enjoy dystopian fiction rooted in ethical questions rather than pure action.
Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuring author Wendy Swift for her latest release, A Dream Life.
Book: A Dream Life Author: Wendy Swift Publication Date: 12 May 2026 Publisher: Vine Leaves Press Pages: 296 Genre: Memoir Available Formats: e-book & Paperback For Readers who Enjoyed:The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, Liar’s Club by Mary Karr, Wild by Cheryl Strayed, The End of Normal by Stephanie Madoff Mack, & A Beautiful, Terrible Thing by Jen Waite
About the Book
When Wendy Swift discovers a letter demanding nearly two million dollars in restitution from her attorney husband, she realizes that her life as a suburban stay-at-home mother has been built on illusion. Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, she believed the quintessential dream life she shared with her husband and three daughters was secure and enduring. A Dream Life traces Swift’s search for validation through marriage, motherhood, and social mobility, and the unraveling that follows.
After her husband begins his incarceration in the 1990s, Swift becomes solely responsible for supporting her three young daughters as they navigate loss, shame, and uncertainty. Her path forward is uneven and hard-won, revealing resilience, reflection, and growth, as well as the perils of blind materialism.
This powerful memoir illuminates the complex challenges families face when confronted with addiction, mental illness, and incarceration. Swift blends unflinching truth-telling with wry self-reflection, awakening readers to the consequences of denial and the restorative power of self-possession. A Dream Life ultimately affirms that anyone can unknowingly fall prey to false beliefs, but once the truth is revealed and the fear of dislocation and upheaval is faced, renewal and strength can emerge.
Wendy Swift is the author of a memoir, A Dream Life, as well as essays published in HuffPost, Memoir Magazine, Grub Street Literary Magazine, Barely South Review, Yellow Arrow Journal, Brevity Blog and Lonesome Press. In 2006, Swift earned the Press Club of Long Island Award for her essay “Ritter’s Pond,” and in 2022, she earned Honorable Mention from the Connecticut Press Club for “The Sentencing.” In addition, Swift is a mentor with We Are Not Numbers, a writing platform for Palestinian writers. Swift serves as a fiction reader for Mud Season Review. She lives in Connecticut and when she is not writing or thinking about writing, she is walking wooded trails with her hound, Lulu.
If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com
Author:Cody Burke Release Date: 24 March 2026 Series: Genre: Memoir Format: E-book Pages: 274 pages Publisher: Eternal Lotus Publishing Blurb: The Father, the Dog and the Conspiracy Theorist is Cody Burke’s unfiltered story of breaking down and breaking free. In this raw and darkly funny memoir, the author battles his ego and demons as he navigates the absurdity of 2020 as a “conspiracy theorist”. His father is dying, but his family is more concerned about social distancing. He attempts to destroy the government narrative to save his family and to save the world… or is he just stroking his own ego? Through psychological spirals, absurd humour, and uncomfortable honesty, the author strives to “question everything”. This memoir pulls you inside to not only the chaos of mental collapse, but to the chaos of evolution. You will find humour in the madness, hope in the heartbreak, and perhaps even you will begin to question everything. Just don’t lose your head…
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
The Father, the Dog and the Conspiracy Theorist by Cody Burke is a raw and candid memoir about mental health, family, masculinity, fear, spiritual awakening, political disillusionment, and grief. Beginning with author Burke’s sense that part of him “died” at twenty-seven, the book moves through childhood in the west of Scotland, anxiety, insecurity, marijuana dependence, self-diagnosis, lockdown, conspiracy thinking, his intense bond with his father, and finally the arrival of Tuco (the little Jack Russell) who becomes the emotional and spiritual centre of the memoir.
What makes the book compelling is its voice. Author Burke writes with rough-edged honesty, lacing profanity, humour, wounds, and self-awareness in an often brutally unfiltered way. The prose is not polished in a conventional literary sense, but it has a strong confessional force. The early chapters are especially effective because they reveal the emotional foundation beneath everything that follows. The sections on lockdown and conspiracy thinking are likely to be the book’s most polarising. Still the book is most interesting when read less as a manifesto and more as a portrait of a mind under pressure.
If I had one reservation, it is that the book can sometimes feel overextended. There are moments where the digressions into politics, online rabbit holes, and ideological analysis could have been tightened to give the memoir a sharper emotional through-line. However, the sprawl also feels inseparable from the book’s identity. This is not a neat memoir about healing. It is a messy, searching, sometimes uncomfortable account of a man trying to understand how fear enters the body, love keeps people tethered, and grief can split reality into a before and after.
Overall, The Father, the Dog and the Conspiracy Theorist is a fiercely personal memoir with a great deal of heart beneath its anger and chaos. Its most powerful achievement is its portrait of love: love between father and son, love for a dog who becomes family, and love as the fragile force that keeps a person from disappearing into fear completely.
A rogue planet is coming. Humanity’s last city has a plan. You won’t like it.
Pete wakes in POD 217 with blood on his face and no memory of yesterday. The Last Great City is clean, pleasurable, and perfectly controlled — as long as its citizens follow the cycle. Reset. Comply. Repeat.
Pete keeps failing the reset.
Somewhere in the city, a woman named Marla is looking for him. Somewhere in the past, two scientists just watched something enormous pass in front of Betelgeuse. And somewhere at the edge of a dying wasteland, a cybernaut older than civilization is sitting under a cherry tree, watching the feral descendants of humanity dance under a dying star.
Salvation Reigned moves across fractured time and colliding perspectives — the scientists who saw it coming, the city that chose control over truth, the lovers whose bond survives every attempt to erase it, and the machine left behind to witness what persists when everything else is gone.
Raw. Nonlinear. Uncompromising.
This is not a story about heroes. It is a story about what love, memory, and consciousness do when a system tries to delete them.
Adult content: extreme language and graphic violence.
For fans of Philip K. Dick, Chuck Palahniuk, and Jeff VanderMeer.
Travis James Peterson is a former Marine. He has spent much of his life analyzing the world through geospatial data. Reading patterns. Looking for truth in the noise by shaping chaos into something meaningful.
The story came the way most truths do. Slowly, like water undercutting a riverbank. Then all at once. Like a mass waste event dumping earth into a violent flow. For years it lived in fragments. Flashes of light, neon flames crawling across a dark sky. Images without a frame. It wasn’t until sleep was contingent on writing a few good words that the story started taking shape. Then dreamscapes fueled his race with the morning sun to capture a story that flashed behind closed eyes.
Travis writes dark, philosophical science fiction. Short, punchy, and unafraid of hard questions.
If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com
Author:Stefanos Sampanis Release Date: 19 January 2026 Series: The Journey of the Wish (Book 1 of 2) Genre: Fantasy Format: E-book Pages: 435 pages Publisher: – Blurb: I perceived the world and acknowledged all of its colours. There was truth; the kind you cannot simply speak of. A tale suits the cause better. It is a disguise that anyone can enjoy and if intrigued, look behind it. This is my testament. A fantasy saga exploring the most human reality. A Journey that lies ahead and matures with each page turned.
Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
The Grey Winter of the Enslaved by Stefanos Sampanis, the first book in The Journey of the Wish series, is an ambitious epic fantasy that opens with myth, grief, and exile rather than easy adventure. At the centre of the story is Glimm, a young Elf-Fairy child whose life is violently severed from Spring after his mother is killed by Orcs and he is forced into Winter, where survival comes at a devastating cost: blindness, loss of touch, a hail-covered body, and enslavement under King Semela in the Mount of Billows. The novel’s mythology is dense and distinctive, built around Seven Gods, seasonal laws, Slumber, curses, Clarity, and the uneasy moral structure of the Enslaved.
What immediately stands out is the originality of the worldbuilding. Author Sampanis does not offer a conventional elves-and-orcs fantasy; instead, he constructs a world governed by seasons, divine attraction, ritual labour, and ecological duty. The Enslaved are not merely prisoners; they are cursed servants of Winter, responsible for gathering the remnants of Spring and helping the season function. This gives the novel one of its strongest ideas: that punishment, purpose, survival, and servitude can become frighteningly entangled. Glimm’s Clarity, his ability to perceive the world in grey, three-dimensional impressions after losing his sight, is also a fascinating narrative device, and it shapes the prose in unusual ways.
Emotionally, the novel is strongest when it focuses on Glimm’s grief and his complicated relationships. His bond with Than, the silent stone Giant, is one of the book’s most tender elements; without conventional dialogue, their friendship develops through loyalty, protection, humour, and repeated acts of trust. Ephiren, the old Elf, gives the story philosophical depth and helps Glimm understand pain, memory, and purpose. Setierphiane, the water Wisp, introduces hope, longing, and the possibility of return, not only to Spring, but to feeling, desire, and choice. Through these relationships, Glimm becomes more than a cursed child; he becomes someone slowly learning the difference between survival and living.
That said, this is not an easy or fast read. The prose is heavy, sometimes overextended, and the worldbuilding can feel overwhelming, especially in the long mythological passages and repeated explanations of divine systems. The translation also gives the language a slightly formal, sometimes uneven quality; while this occasionally adds to the mythic atmosphere, it can also make certain sentences feel stiff or densely packed. Readers who prefer clean, swift fantasy plotting may struggle with the book’s pace and philosophical weight. But readers who enjoy slow, immersive, lore-rich fantasy, especially stories that feel closer to myth than modern commercial fantasy, will likely find a great deal to admire here.
Overall, The Grey Winter of the Enslaved is a dark, unusual, and deeply imaginative opening to The Journey of the Wish. It is impressive in scope, sincerity, and conceptual ambition. Its greatest strength lies in the way it turns fantasy suffering into a meditation on purpose: what it means to lose one’s world, to be remade against one’s will, and still search for a wish powerful enough to lead one back toward life.
The Reading Bud 