You can now read a good chunk of chapter three over at Tor.com: bread-making, ruined Notre-Dame, and Lucifer Morningstar himself!

Mahvesh Murad interviews me for Midnight in Karachi.

I speak manga and anime inspiration to Fran Wilde at Geek Mom.

For the Gollancz festival, Anna Caltabiano, Al Robertson, Alex Lamb, Simon Spanton and I get in a “time travel vs fallen angels vs spaceships vs ventriloquist dummies” panel.

A survey of upcoming Science Fiction and Fantasy mentions The House of Shattered Wings:

Urban fantasies are also exploring fresh settings, like the alternate war-ravaged late 20th-century Paris of Nebula Award winner Aliette de Bodard’s The House of Shattered Wings. Roc/Ace editors Gill and Sowards praise the novel for its lush writing, informed by the author’s own experiences living in Paris and her Vietnamese heritage.

Also pleased to announce I (and a raft of authors!) will be part of the Gollancz festival on October 16th/17th in Manchester/London. You can get info and tickets at the above link.

Welcome back to Shattered Wings Thursdays, the weekly feature of art related to The House of Shattered Wings. 12 days to release of the Roc hardcover edition (and 14 days to the Gollancz trade paperback). Eep. Almost there!

Today: second-to-last of the magical factions (well, at least those I have space for :p)

Lazarus is an interesting faction: first, because it’s a recently founded House (it was founded shortly before the war), and second, because all its heads of Houses have been human. There are no rules that say a House has to be headed by a Fallen, but nevertheless it tends to happen, because Fallen are longer-lived and have a better natural aptitude for magic.

Lazarus is currently headed by Claire, a sixty-year-old woman with a grandmotherly attitude (and if you think that means nice you need a refresher course about grandmothers ^^). The colors of the House are brown and green, its arms are an antlered man emerging from a cavern, and its motto is “Firma nunquamque lapsa” (“Steady never falling”). Its philosophy of life can best be summed up as “divide to reign.” House Lazarus knows it will never be as strong or as powerful as other Houses, and therefore thrives on encouraging discord.

Notable characters from Hawthorn: Claire, the head of the House; Eric, her bodyguard and lover.

Previous iterations of this:

1. Meet nuked Paris
2. The Fallen
3. The Houses
4. The Immortals
5. The Colonies
6. House Silverspires
7. House Hawthorn

Read Chapter One!
Read excerpt from Chapter Three!
Read excerpt from Chapter Four!

Full Pinterest board:
Follow Aliette de Bodard’s board House of Shattered Wings on Pinterest.

(and there’s a map of the book’s key locations at the bottom of the novel’s page)

So… by the magic of Rafflecopter, the following people have won a signed hardcover of The House of Shattered Wings:
-Peter S K
-Michelle Clarke
-Jessie M

Congratulations!

Yeah, I added a third hardcover as there were so many entries! Really delighted at the enthusiasm for this.

If you feel like you missed out: the RT Book Reviews giveaway of 5 ARCs is still on-going here. (and even if you don’t, there’s an extra excerpt with the giveaway, featuring geeky alchemist Madeleine and Head of House Hawthorn Asmodeus).

Other House of Shattered Wings news: Freda Warrington at Book Riot lists it as one of 5 books to get into paranormal fantasy (honored to be in the same list as NK Jemisin!):

One of the darkest and strangest fantasies I’ve ever read, containing the creepiest villain ever, the appalling Asmodeus, it haunts you long after you’ve finished it.

(yes, the same Asmodeus that’s in the excerpt. Isn’t life fun? 🙂 )

Just a quick heads-up that the RT Books website has a large chunk of The House of Shattered Wings, featuring a third point-of-view character who isn’t in Chapter One: Madeleine, the geeky alchemist of House Silverspires. And it comes with a chance of winning an ARC of the book with the pretty “burning feathers” cover ^-^

Go check it out here!

I’ve been really, really remiss with these:

• My Xuya story “Crossing the Midday Gate” will appear in Athena Andreadis’s awesome looking To Shape the Dark (full TOC here), an anthology about women scientists and a successor to her Other Half of the Sky (which had “The Waiting Stars” in it). Mine is a biologist dealing with the fallout of a plague, and how to earn favour once again…
• My sort-of-Xuya story about virtual realities and access control “First Presentation” will be in David Brin’s and Steven W Potts’ Chasing Shadows, alongside work by Neal Stephenson, Robert Silverberg, Sylvia Spruck Wrigley, Stephen Gaskell, Nancy Fulda… *gulp*
• “The Death of Aiguillon” will be published in Yanni Kuznia’s A Fantasy Medley 3, with work by Jacqueline Carey (!), Kevin Hearne, and Laura Bickle. This is set in the universe of my upcoming novel The House of Shattered Wings, and follows a kitchen girl after the fall of the House of Aiguillon and the refuge she finds in a Paris torn apart by the Great Houses War. I’m pretty psyched about this one: it’s coming out from Subterranean Press and will be published at the end of 2015.

So… the copies of The House of Shattered Wings hardcover have hit writer central. Isn’t it the prettiest?

I’ve got two to give away–you could get your hands on this ahead of release! (it’d of course be awesome if you could subsequently leave a review at amazon/goodreads/etc., but it’s not compulsory)

Want one? Just enter below. It’s a simpler giveaway than the previous one hopefully! It’s open anywhere in the world, I’ll sign and ship these ASAP.
(it’s also not compulsory to subscribe to the mailing list to enter. It’s just that I wanted to give an advantage to people who already on it)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Still undecided? In addition to all the buzz, it recently got a Publishers Weekly starred review: “…a fantastical spy thriller that reads like a hybrid of le Carré and Milton, all tinged with the melancholy of golden ages lost.” I’m sure you want to read that, right?