Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Fantasy

THE DAWNHOUNDS

Sascha Stronach

Gideon the Ninth meets Black Sun in Maori author Sascha Stronach's queer fantasy debut about a police officer who is murdered, brought back to life with a mysterious new power, and tasked with preventing an attack on her city.

The port city of Hainak is alive: its buildings, its fashion, even its weapons. After a devastating war and a sweeping biotech revolution, all its inhabitants want is peace.

Yat Jyn-Hok, a reformed thief-turned-cop, patrols the streets at night, recently demoted on the force due to "lifestyle choices" after being caught at a gay club. She's barely holding it together, haunted by memories of a lover who vanished and voices that float in and out of her head like radio signals. On her shift one evening, Yat stumbles across a body, but before she can call it in, she's murdered by two fellow officers and dumped in the harbor.

Unfortunately for them, she wakes up.
Resurrected by an ancient power, she finds herself with the new ability to manipulate life force. Quickly falling in with the pirate crew who has saved her, she must race against time to stop a plague from being unleashed by an evil that has taken root in Hainak.

Sascha Stronach is a tech writer by day and a fiction writer by night. He is currently based in Wellington, New Zealand, but has also lived in Singapore and Indonesia, which have inspired parts of the fictional worlds he creates. He first broke out into speculative fiction by experimenting with the short form. The Dawnhounds, his debut novel, won the Sir Julius Vogel Award at WorldCon 78.

Available products
Book Published 2022-06-01 by Saga Press
Book Published 2022-06-01 by Saga Press

Comments

Worldbuilding at its peak. The Dawnhounds heaves with life, a tan- gible sense of cosmic power simmering from the waters around this port city and from the people trying to save it. Just don't call them heroes, aye.

Fiercely queer. A strange and wondrous reimagining of noir that takes its cues from biopunk and SE Asian mythos to create something wholly different. There's real imagination at work hereI loved it.

The Dawnhounds roots in the mind like a night garden, vital and voracious. I can't get it out of my head.

The tones of Stronach and Pratchett are enormously similar. . . . Delightful.

The Dawnhounds packs hard-hitting, mind-bending weirdness into a story that's still touching and human. If you're looking for gritty queer spec fic that isn't unrelentingly grim, you've found it.

Intensely humane and beautiful. Stronach's richly imagined world is never too heavy for itself: shot through with black humor at every turn, it is nonetheless tender and sympathetic while also being starkly unsentimental. Part police procedural, part queer fever dream, part love letter to a city that doesn't exist: Stronach makes the impossible look easy. Its distinctly Kiwi voice is a new salvo for New Zealand fantasy on an international stage. I loved it.