This September, Tor Books are due to publish the latest novel by Premee Mohamed: Wickhills. It looks like it could be described as a spy thriller set in a fantasy world, which makes it of great interest to this reader. As a long-time fan of the author’s work, I’m really looking forward to this — and hopefully soon (I was lucky enough to get a DRC via NetGalley). Here’s the synopsis:
In the dangerous magical city of Wickhills, a streetwise secret agent is tasked with protecting a foreign defector from his pursuers… even at the threat of war.
Looking after a defecting scientist should have been Ferec’s easiest mission. But now he’s on the run from the intelligence agency he works for, dodging a handler who might have gone rogue and relying on a secret patchwork of illicit resources and dodgy contacts. Turns out his defector might be carrying an apocalypse-level magical weapon — and protecting it requires Ferec and his team to go underground, literally. Down here, the rules are very different… and the tense peace between every city in the world will shatter unless Ferec can drag their darkest secrets into the light.
Premee Mohamed’s Wickhills is due to be published by Tor Books in North America and in the UK, on September 8th.
Also on CR: Guest Post on “Influences & Inspirations”; Annotated Excerpt from The Annual Migration of Birds; Excerpt from We Speak Through the Mountain
This week, ECW Press publishes the latest novel from Premee Mohamed! We Speak Through the Mountain returns to the post-apocalyptic society of the acclaimed The Annual Migration of Clouds. Check out the synopsis:
I wrote The Annual Migration of Clouds all in a rush in 2019 after seeing a single tweet from an entomologist I followed (I didn’t even read the paper right away!) containing the phrase ‘heritable symbiont.’ My imagination yanked the reins from my hands and went galloping across a blank document I think literally hours later; dimly I suspected the paper was probably about Wolbachia, a bacterial genus that inhabits some insects and affects their reproduction and behaviour, but I was too excited about the possibilities for a human disease. And ofcourse there are human diseases and syndromes caused by infections that affect our behaviour, as well as examples in various other species (Cordyceps is the obvious one, but there’s also Toxoplasmosis, many infections that cross the blood-brain barrier, certain parasitic infections of the gut, etc).
My parents said I was talking at eight months, and I believed them because many of my cousins also started super early; they said I was walking before I was a year old, and I believed them for the same reason. But when they told me that I could read when I was two, I made an earsplittingly loud raspberry noise. How could that even be possible?
Civilian Reader 