The House of Shattered Wings

LoveReading Says

Highly Recommended.

This is a refreshing, beautifully imagined and original fantasy that takes archetypal tropes and one of the world’s most familiar settings and makes them new via a weaving together of different cultural flavours and a light but artful prose style. Add engaging characters and an intriguing plot and you have a fantasy that stands head, shoulders and wings above much fantasy in the market.
Angels have become an extraordinary phenomenon in popular culture in the USA but de Bodard’s angels could not be further from the anodyne biblical whitewashings of the spiritual pot-boiler. These are arcane and mysterious individuals who are suffering the fallout of a war in Heaven. And some have literally fallen. And in The House of Shattered Wings they have fallen into a ruinous Paris, stained by magic, that has barely survived the effects of Heaven’s strife and the Great Magicians War. Fallen angels are brutally harvested for every scrap of their being to provide fuel for magic. This may be a magical world but it is also a harsh one. One house of Magicians, bereft of its long lost founder Morningstar must now face a new threat in the shadows. De Bodard describes Paris gorgeously but also adds the authentic influence of France’s colonial adventures in Vietnam into this most European of cities. Varied, rich, vivid and propelled by the story of three very different characters, this is perfect for fans of authors as diverse as Angela Carter and Kate Griffin. ~ Simon Spanton

Maxim Jakubowski's view...

A major new writer comes of age with this splendid, sprawling fantasy novel quite unlike much of what is sold as fantasy these days, what with predictable wizards, dragons and endless quests none of which appear here by a long shot. In a ruined and decadent future Paris ruled by fallen angels, various Houses compete for domination of the fabled city in the rubble left by the Great Magicians War. In a recognisable landscape touched by overlapping layers of unreality, a motley trio comes together, a troubled alchemist, a naive but powerful fallen and a young man with a gift for wielding spells from the Far East. A murder mystery with magic attached, an evocation of immemorial Vietnamese legends (the author, who lives in Paris, is of Vietnamese descent), beautiful and brutal, grotesque and moving, this is a mighty novel that will break down the doors of the imagination and leave them wide open to unsettling but fascinating new vistas. Delightful. ~ Maxim Jakubowski

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