What happens when the forces of light and darkness attempt to co-exist in peace? Twenty years after her fateful first voyage north, Laila is preparing for her campaign to become the next impératrice of Soleterea, contending with negative attitudes towards chaos magic and the demons who wield it. In the meantime, Darius has settled into his new position as the rex of Mortos, but his rule has not been without conflict and conspiracy, either. When her mother suggests that Laila distinguish herself politically by lending a hand to the famine-stricken Mortesians, she finds herself once more crossing paths with her old lover and confronting the whirlwind of emotions that twenty years apart have done little to settle. Determined to put her feelings to one side, Laila throws herself headfirst into the viper pit of Mortesian court politics to try to win their favour. However, Darius has an allure of his own—one that is not quite so simple to resist. The second instalment in the Essence of the Equinox trilogy continues on the trajectory of character-driven gaslamp fantasy with high emotional stakes and classical worldbuilding. KEYWORDS: Romantic fantasy series, second book in series, gaslamp fantasy, political fantasy, villain romance, light vs dark, gothic romance, doomed love story, magic, fallen stars, court intrigue, forbidden love, villain gets the girl, star-crossed lovers

Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds. But the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As Laurie Shannon reveals in The Accommodated Animal, the modern human / animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’s famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am.” Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what she terms cosmopolity. With Shakespeare as her touchstone, Shannon explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of Genesis to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, Shannon argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering “the question of the animal” historically, The Accommodated Animal makes a brilliant contribution to cross-disciplinary debates engaging animal studies, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.

An October 2022 IndieNext pick ”[An] engaging and beautifully narrated quest for personal fulfillment and musical recognition...This is a fast-paced tale in which music and love always take center stage...A truly gifted musician, Price writes about her journey with refreshing candor.”—Kirkus, starred review ”Brutally honest...a vivid and poignant memoir.”—The Guardian Country music star Margo Price shares the story of her struggle to make it in an industry that preys on its ingenues while trying to move on from devastating personal tragedies. When Margo Price was nineteen years old, she dropped out of college and moved to Nashville to become a musician. She busked on the street, played open mics, and even threw out her TV so that she would do nothing but write songs. She met Jeremy Ivey, a fellow musician who would become her closest collaborator and her husband. But after working on their craft for more than a decade, Price and Ivey had no label, no band, and plenty of heartache. Maybe We’ll Make It is a memoir of loss, motherhood, and the search for artistic freedom in the midst of the agony experienced by so many aspiring musicians: bad gigs and long tours, rejection and sexual harassment, too much drinking and barely enough money to live on. Price, though, refused to break, and turned her lowest moments into the classic country songs that eventually comprised the debut album that launched her career. In the authentic voice hailed by Pitchfork for tackling "Steinbeck-sized issues with no-bullshit humility," Price shares the stories that became songs, and the small acts of love and camaraderie it takes to survive in a music industry that is often unkind to women. Now a Grammy-nominated “Best New Artist,” Price tells a love story of music, collaboration, and the struggle to build a career while trying to maintain her singular voice and style.

The protagonist, the 16-year-old Amanda is the only child of an Inn keeper in the scottish Highlands. Her life was pretty uneventful and protected until one cold January morning some dreadful news turned everything upside down. “Clouds of powdery snow drifted across the frozen meadows like bands of golden gossamer as the sun rose over Glen Orchy. Amanda lay awake, gazing at the crystalline ice flowers that had covered her window overnight. Soon she would have to get out of her cosy bed to help her grandmother to prepare the food for the inn’s early guests. Today was the first market day after Hogmanay so that the Inn would be crowded with travelling tradesman, farmers and people from the surrounding villages and hamlets. Amanda eagerly looked forward to hearing, the latest news and juicy gossip but most of all, to the visit of her best friends. It is going to be a fantastic day; she thought as she closed her eyes, hoping she could remain in bed a bit longer. Little did she know that the news she longed to hear would shatter her life and replace the feeling of tranquillity with fear and tribulation. Soon, very soon, she would learn that her very survival depended on her friends loyalty, the ability to fight and the help from beings she believed to only exist in myths and legends.