Must-Read A Trio of Books from Titan Books

Must-Read A Trio of Books from Titan Books

In this article, we delve into three remarkable works that embody the creativity and depth of contemporary fiction. Ai Jiang offers a haunting tale of rebellion against oppression in A Palace Near the Wind. Jedediah Berry intricately explores language in The Naming Song. Eric LaRocca presents a disturbing yet poignant narrative in At Dark I Become Loathsome. These novels challenge us to reflect on themes of identity, nature, and the complexity of the human experience. Join us as we journey through these powerful narratives that illuminate the beauty and struggle of our world.

A Palace Near the Wind (Natural Engines) by Ai Jiang 

This book is by a rising-star author. The author is a winner of both the Bram Stoker® and Nebula Awards. It is a richly inventive, brutal, and beautiful science-fantasy novella. A story of family, loss, oppression and rebellion that will stay with you long after the final page. This book is for readers of Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune. It is also ideal for fans of Neon Yang’s The Black Tides of Heaven and Kritika H. Rao’s The Surviving Sky.

Liu Lufeng is the eldest princess of the Feng royalty and, bound by duty and tradition, the next bride to the human king. The Feng people have bark faces, arms made of braided branches, and hair of needle threads. They live within nature and are nurtured by the land. But they exist under the constant threat of human expansion, and the negotiation of bridewealth is the only way to stop—or at least delay—the destruction of their home. But come her wedding day, Lufeng plans to kill the king and finally put an end to the marriages.

Trapped in the great human palace in the run-up to the union, Lufeng begins to uncover the truth about her peoples’ origins and realizes they will never be safe from the humans. So she must learn to let go of duty and tradition, choose her allies carefully, and risk the unknown in order to free her family and shape her own fate.

A powerfully imaginative, compelling story of a young woman seeking to save her family and her home, as well as a devastating meditation on the destruction of the natural world for the sake of an industrial future.

Praise for A Palace Near the Wind:

Enchanting, mysterious, and strange, A Palace Near the Wind is a heartbreaking story of homecoming and self-discovery. Combining the best of folklore and science fiction, this eco-narrative on human greed and superhuman hope is not to be missed.
–Kritika H. Rao, author of The Surviving Sky

A fantastic and magical tale of survival and rebellion set against the backdrop of a struggle between nature and the forces of industry. Ai Jiang has written a beautiful and all too-fitting story that resonates with the choices we face in our times.
–P. DjËlÌ Clark, author of The Dead Cat Tail Assassins and A Master of Djinn

About Ai Jiang 

Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer, winner of the Bram Stoker (R), Nebula and Ignyte Awards, and Hugo, Astounding, Locus, and BSFA Award finalist, and an immigrant from Changle, Fujian currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. Her work can be found in F&SF, The Dark, Uncanny, The Masters Review, among others. She is the recipient of Odyssey Workshop’s 2022 Fresh Voices Scholarship and the author of Linghun and I AM AI. The first book of her novella duology, A Palace Near the Wind, is forthcoming 2025 with Titan Books. Find her on most social media platforms and for more information go to aijiang.ca.

Must-Read A Trio of Books from Titan Books

In a world where words are power, there is nothing more dangerous than an unnamed thing.

Enter an epic world of ghosts and monsters, magical trains and nameless wonders in this gorgeous lyrical fantasy, perfect for fans of Susanna Clarke, The Starless Sea and the films of Guillermo del Toro. 

When something fell from the something tree, all the words went away. And the world changed.

Monsters slipped from dreams. The land began to shift and ghosts wandered the world in trances. Only with the rise of the named and their committees―Maps, Ghosts, Dreams, and Names―could humanity stand against the terrors of the nameless wilds. Now, they build borders, shackle ghosts and hunt monsters. The nameless are to be fought, and feared.

One unnamed courier of the names committee travels aboard the Number Twelve train, assigning names to the people and things that need them. Her position on the train grants her safety in a world that otherwise fears her. But when she accidentally pulls a monster from a dream, and attacks by the nameless rock the Number Twelve, she is forced to flee. Accompanied by a patchwork ghost, a fretful monster, and a nameless animal who prowls the borders between realities, she sets out to look for her long-lost sister.

Her search for the truth of her own life opens the door to a revolutionary future―for the words she carries will reshape the world.

At once a love letter to the power of language and an exploration of its limits, The Naming Song is the perfect fantasy for anyone who’s ever dreamed of a stranger, freer, more magical world.

Praise for The Naming Song Paperback by Jedediah Berry

At the heart of this brilliant, thrilling adventure is an exploration of the power of words to transform the way we see ourselves, our history, and our possible futures. The Naming Song understands the fundamental magic of language, and breathes that magic onto every page.
–Holly Black, number one Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Night

A breathlessly enjoyable tale.
–Cassandra Clare, Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of Sword Catcher

The Naming Song is a wonder. A masterful, marvel-filled journey of language and ghosts, of monsters and meaning and mystery. This is a haunting, glorious train ride of a novel that feels both new and old at the same time, a creature of post-apocalyptic myth.
–Erin Morgenstern, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Starless Sea and The Night Circus

Every writer, of course, must make magic out of words – but in The Naming Song Jedediah Berry makes strange and wonderful magic out of the absence of words. This book is a parade of delights and nightmares, written with the kind of incantatory precision that the truest spells are made of.
–Kelly Link, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Get In Trouble

Deeply immersive, magnificently imagined, Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song is an epic tale of the fantastic, where language – quite literally – has the power to remake the world. This is a vast and sweeping wonder of a novel.
–J. M. Miro, bestselling author of Ordinary Monsters

Addition

About Jedediah Berry 

Jedediah Berry is the author of The Naming Song, available now from Tor Books. His first novel, The Manual of Detection, won the Crawford Award and the Hammett Prize, and was adapted for broadcast by BBC Radio 4.His story in cards, The Family Arcana, was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award. His Ennie Award-winning tabletop adventure game setting, The Valley of Flowers, was cowritten with Andrew McAlpine and published by Phantom Mill Games. Together with his partner, writer Emily Houk, he runs Ninepin Press, an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and games in unusual shapes. He lives in Western Massachusetts.

Must-Read A Trio of Books from Titan Books

At Dark I Become Loathsome by Eric LaRocca

From the Bram Stoker Award®-finalist and Splatterpunk Award-winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, a grim yet gentle, horrifying yet hopeful tale of grief, trauma, and love.

If you’re reading this, you’ve likely thought that the world would be a better place without you.

A single line of text, glowing in the darkness of the internet. Written by Ashley Lutin, who has often thought that, and worse, in the years since his wife died and his young son disappeared. But the peace of the grave is not for Ashley—it’s for those he can help. Ashley Lutin has constructed a peculiar ritual for those whose desire to die is at war with their yearning to live a better life.

Struggling to overcome his never-ending grief, one night Ashley connects with Jinx, who spins a tale both revolting and fascinating. This begins a relationship that traps the men in a tightening spiral of painful revelations, where long-hidden secrets are dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light.

Only through pain can we find healing. Only through death can we find life.

Praise for At Dark I Become Loathsome:

At Dark, I Become Loathsome is a genuinely disturbing matryoshka doll of a novel that honors the tie bounding grief and our darkest impulses. This is LaRocca’s best book yet.
–Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World

Brutal, breathtaking, and beautifully written, At Dark, I Become Loathsome is Eric LaRocca at his best. It broke my heart and put it back together again, leaving jagged little scars. LaRocca is a master at peeling back the layers and showing us true darkness and depravity, the loathsome monster hiding inside us all. I applaud him for his bravery, and you, dear reader, for yours.
–Jennifer McMahon, New York Times Bestselling author of The Winter People and My Darling Girl

At Dark, I Become Loathsome continues to prove that LaRocca is a master navigator of the beautiful and the grotesque, plumbing the darkest, maddest depths of the human heart and retrieving from within all the grief and all the guilt the heart can hold. If there is a greatest strength here-in a book full of them-it is that LaRocca writes with an unswerving attention to the empathy of his characters, caring about them, even when they are, as the title suggests, loathsome.
–Chuck Wendig, author of The Book of Accidents and Black River Orchard

Terror, humor, humanity, lust, loss: at dark, everything, everything comes out. And Eric LaRocca is afraid of nothing.
–Kathe Koja, author of The Cipher and Skin

A visceral, unflinching, and yet startlingly humane plunge into desire, depravity, and the essential loneliness of existence-this is a book that you won’t, and indeed, can’t soon forget.
–Kay Chronister, author of Desert Creatures and The Bog Wife

About Eric LaRocca

Eric LaRocca (he/they) is a 2x Bram Stoker Award® finalist and Splatterpunk Award winner. Esquire named him one of the “Writers Shaping Horror’s Next Golden Age,” and Locus praised him as “one of the strongest and most unique voices in contemporary horror fiction.” LaRocca’s notable works include Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, Everything the Darkness Eats, The Trees Grew Because I Bled There: Collected Stories, and You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood. He will publish his upcoming novel, At Dark, I Become Loathsome, in January 2025. The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus already optioned the book for film.

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