Trent Jamieson: 10 books

Four magicians, four worlds. Magic never makes things easier, and things are never easy. Here you'll find a city grown addictive, a dark wizard mourning his wife, a world that has lost its colour, and a man who can persuade anything into becoming anything, except the woman he loves into...

The door, and most of its frame, shot across the room. For a moment, Yossard wondered if the door had decided to destroy itself in preference to hearing Marisen’s damn song.

"Ah, it seems I've lost a bet, my friend. I thought you wouldn't reach us before the darkness." "A bet?"Tone was bent over, coughing. "Yes a bet. We've been watching your progress for the past twenty minutes. Few travel these days and you were a point of interest and a point...

Lady Luck was sweet on him, mines would fail beneath his heavy, stumbling shoes, bullets ricochet off his thrawn helmet, and sabres merely part his hair or crack one of the finger-thick lenses of his glasses. Every war, no matter the outcome, Will survived

My jackit bristled with elegances, the best money could buy. I had the contacts and the crew. The best company, the best Spartoi on this edge of the solar system. All of it mine. And none of it made any difference.

I was born mad. Crazy. Born with teeth and snapping. Bit the old doctor's finger, tasted blood before milk, suckled hard, gave a little pain before I let the world have my tears. My mum says that's all the child I was allowed, that moment of insolence. Didn't stop her treating me like one. Didn't stop the thrashings I got.

Cold winds blow across the dark hills some miles north of here and brush chill lips against the scattered and yellow bones of my father. I picture them there, in the goblin-field of my memory, wind and beast-gnawed bones, and I mourn the loss of everything that I held dear. Lost so long ago to the sigh and sorrow of those cold dark hills.

Alarm bells rang.Common enough in a state of Anthozoan war. Tocsins echoing: warning of collisions imminent or induline spore clouds and polyps drifting and falling like death.But this clamour was different, urgent and strange.

"Surely you're not frightened of death, Padre," Galley shouted down at me, pitching his voice to cut through the white noise clouding every transmission. He gestured mockingly with one hand and leant into the terrible pull of the planet.I ignored him, gritted my teeth and kept climbing. Afraid,...

The carousel spun, so alien and familiar, I laughed and touched her face and kissed her lips, and gazed at the wonder in her brilliant, beautiful eyes.Doctors had discovered the first one in a tissue sample in a New York hospital; a carousel careening amongst cancer cells. Pedologists in a...