Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Fantasy

RADIANT

Karina Sumner-Smith

Short fiction Nebula-nominee Sumner-Smiths's debut novel features two brilliant female protagonists who join forces to save each other from evil exploitation of their remarkable powers.

Xhea has no magic. Born without the power that everyone else takes for granted, Xhea is an outcast—no way to earn a living, buy food, or change the life that fate has dealt her. Yet she has a unique talent: the ability to see ghosts and the tethers that bind them to the living world, which she uses to scratch out a bare existence in the ruins beneath the City’s floating Towers. When a rich City man comes to her with a young woman’s ghost tethered to his chest, Xhea has no idea that this ghost will change everything. The ghost, Shai, is a Radiant, a rare person who generates so much power that the Towers use it to fuel their magic, heedless of the pain such use causes. Shai’s home Tower is desperate to get the ghost back and force her into a body—any body—so that it can regain its position, while the Tower’s rivals seek the ghost to use her magic for their own ends. Caught between a multitude of enemies and desperate to save Shai, Xhea thinks herself powerless—until a strange magic wakes within her. Magic dark and slow, like rising smoke, like seeping oil. A magic whose very touch brings death. With two extremely strong female protagonists, Radiant is a story of fighting for what you believe in and finding strength that you never thought you had. Karina Sumner-Smith is a Canadian author of fantasy, science fiction, and young adult. Her short fiction has appeared in The Living Dead 2, The Best Horror of the Year Volume Three, and Children of Magic, among others. Among being reprinted in a number of anthologies, her short stories have also been nominated for the Nebula Award and have been translated into Czech and Spanish. She lives in Ontario.

Available products
Book Published 2014-09-30 by Skyhorse/Talos

Comments

"A first novel Radiant may be, but by a writer at the top of her craft. Be taken to breathless heights of imagination. Feel your heart pound until it almost breaks, then sigh for joy. This, dear readers, is the story you mustn't miss and will never forget. Recommended? No. I insist. Read Radiant.

This beautifully-written page turner is topnotch. A world that comes alive, rich and magical; characters you want to spend time with; a heroine to root for; trust, friendship, and belonging -- Radiant has it all! Fantasy not your cup of tea? You should read this one anyway; it deserves space on every bookshelf. Where's the next one?"

I love this. The writing is beautiful, the world, seen from the perspective of the have-nots, both magical and bleak. At heart it's a book about trust, loss, and the friendships that are built in spite of the bad things. It's about finding a small place--no matter how strange that place or how strange the characters (and they are)--to belong.

With a clean, evocative style (“Outside, the world was the grey of fishing weights and galvanized nails”), a clever transposition of corporate warfare into a feudal future, and a strong, complementary pair of protagonists, Sumner-Smith’s Towers Trilogy is off to a captivating start.

In penning her novel Radiant, Karina Sumner-Smith steps into the top ranks of a burgeoning generation of authors who are changing the face of science fiction and fantasy. With characterizations that won't let you go, deeply textured world-building, and prose that sings, she offers a book that deserves to become a classic.