The March Book Choice
Following last night’s talk and discussion with visiting author Mark Charon Newton; the book club was so inspired that we’ve chosen the first book in Mark’s Legends of the Red Sun trilogy – Nights of Villjamur as our read for March.
Nights of Villjamur
by Mark Charan Newton
Villjamur is under siege from the encroaching ice age. Refugees threaten to overwhelm the city and stability is undermined from within by scheming chancellors. After the suicide of the emperor, Captain Brynd Lathraea is charged with bringing back the emperor’s daughter from self-imposed exile, to be installed as a puppet empress. Meanwhile Randur Estevu, a country lad with vaunting ambitions, comes to Villjamur seeking immortality. The first instalment in The Legends of the Red Sun series is a dark epic which shows its debt to Gormenghast: death stalks the shadows and scheming, idiosyncratic characters have their own agendas. This is fantasy with vast scope and ambition, and while the prose would have benefited from judicious compression and excision, the novel is a complex, eldritch vision with great potential.
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