Author:Kameron Hurley
'Hurley's world-building is phenomenal . . . highly engaging' Publishers Weekly
The final instalment of the Bel Dame Apocrypha trilogy from Hugo-award winner Kameron Hurley
Nyx is back, alongside the bel dame sisterhood of assassins.
Although the centuries-long war is over, civil unrest is rife, and the fate of one kidnapped politician could be the catalyst for a bloody regime change.
With aliens in the sky and a hint of revolution in the air, Nyx and her team of mutant shape-shifters, torturers and bio-tech magicians have a new mission: save a life to save a country.
*****
Make sure you've read the rest of the series:
1. God's War
2. Infidel
3. Rapture
Kameron Hurley is ferociously imaginative - with an emphasis on ferocious. She writes novels that are smart, dark, visceral and wonderfully, hectically entertaining.
—— Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining GirlsEdge-of-the-seat action set within a strange and alien world that's the mutant child of Frank Herbert and Roger Zelazny. At her best, Hurley's work rivals that of Gene Wolfe, and it burns like a drug in the mind long after you've finished it.
—— David J. Williams, author of The Mirrored Heavens“[H]ighly entertaining… Wonderfully strange and fun, Gonzales' novel follows both the women attacking and defending the Regional Office and how their lives intersect.”
—— Buzzfeed“A tour-de-force… [R]epurposes the devices of a genre specializing in fantasies of mastery into a portrait of chastened adults moving through a world where mastery eludes us all… [W]hat binds the whole thing together is a persistent, self-contradictory human desire to both be extraordinary and to fit in, finally, somewhere. The Regional Office Is Under Attack! sneaks up on you. It starts out looking like a heist yarn intertwined with a couple of origin stories, but it keeps coming back to the stuff people devour superhero comics and spy thrillers to escape: isolation, confusion, triviality, moral doubt.”
—— Laura Miller , Slate“A hugely entertaining read.”
—— Chicago Tribune“Like the writers he is compared to, Gonzales’s stories’ fantastic premises are always anchored in real-world conflicts that hold universal familiarity. The Regional Office is Under Attack!, …carries some of his stories’ thematic arsenal into a book length narrative… The story nods to tons of tropes—from Kill Bill and Charlie’s Angels to Blade Runner and The Karate Kid—but it frequently subverts those tropes and uses them to flesh out characters that dazzle.”
—— The Rumpus“The Regional Office really IS under attack! This is not metaphor! It is a wry and propulsive work of inventive fiction by a terrific young writer! Read it!”
—— Jess Walter, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins“This book is a winged creation, and absolutely marvelous. Gonzales keeps turning the kaleidoscope to reveal the strangest, darkest, and most beautiful dimensions of human love, and the conversion of mechanical fury into living strength.”
—— Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!“[W]hen it comes to fiction it usually doesn’t bring out the LOLs so much as me laughing on the inside. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to find myself cracking up during some of the fight scenes and especially a bunch of the lines with curses while listening to the audiobook of The Regional Office is Under Attack!”
—— BookRiot“So fresh and so funny, the pacing is so fast and crackling, you won't be able to stop reading.”
—— Tor“I wanted to go for a ride and The Regional Office is Under Attack! took me on one… I was rewarded with pure satisfaction.”
—— BookRiot, The Best Books of 2016 So Far“This book is a romp if ever there was one. . . This book is just as exciting as the explanation point in its title makes it sound. It’s the kind of read every reader hungers for.”
—— Bustle“You may not be familiar with the name Manuel Gonzales, but once you’ve had the pleasure of delving into one of his out-of-the-ordinary literary creations, you won’t forget it… In his debut novel, The Regional Office Is Under Attack!, Gonzales conjures a futuristic world of super-powered female assassins… Backstory on each character and the Regional Office itself is delicately spliced between action-packed scenes, making this a wonderfully choreographed narrative. The moment you think you have a grasp on the truth about the Regional Office, Gonzales tosses in a twist that will have you questioning your understanding all over again… The amount of detail Gonzales infuses into this world makes it come alive in an engaging, quirky and delightful way, creating a perfect backdrop to a page-turning plot. Gonzales' tale has something for every reader: Double agents! Secret romantic trysts! Conspiracy! Fight scenes! Friendships gone awry! At its core, however, The Regional Office Is Under Attack! is ultimately a tale of vengeance—one during which you’ll find yourself struggling to choose a side.”
—— BookPage“You might want to get a firm grip on your socks before cracking open this one; otherwise, Gonzales is likely to knock them off. It’s very difficult to categorize this mind-bending novel… it’s pure excitement… A brilliant genre-blender.”
—— Booklist (STARRED review)“The narrative not only bounces between perspectives in short, propelling chapters, but also pinballs in time... Gonzales writes with an abundance of imagination, riffing on comic book and pop culture plot lines and characters while adding his own unique perspective... there are moments of brilliance.”
—— Publishers Weekly“A hyperkinetic sci-fi set piece along the lines of Die Hard seeded with paranormal elements cribbed from half a dozen other franchises and the absent-parent grudges that fuel any number of teen novels. … Genre enthusiasts will love the spooky cyberpunk spirit at play here, and resolute readers will be rewarded with an unexpected ending that ratchets up the action long after the Regional Office has been abandoned. A surprisingly erudite bit of sci-fi that throws in everything but the kitchen sink.”
—— KirkusThe Voice in My Ear is so devastatingly perceptive and intimidatingly accomplished in a range of modes that it's hard to sit still while you're reading; often I found myself pacing up and down the hallway in raptures at the quality of the prose or terror at the exquisitely harrowing turn of the plot. Aside from the formal mastery, Leviston is fearless in facing difficult truths of which lesser writers never even get within telescopic range. Uncompromising and stricken but delivered through beautiful observation and unrivalled emotional and intellectual insight.
—— Luke KennardWhat an extraordinary book, so dense with understanding about personhood and relatedness, about connection, disconnection and unconnection. Frances Leviston puts her distinctive and compelling style at the service of a precise, sinuous, at times agonisingly subcutaneous storytelling. There's a clarity and superobservancy of the everyday that she conveys along with 'the sorrow that never was said': the hidden, the unspeakable, that shapes so much of experience.
—— David HaydenThis heated, haunted debut is about the dark, violent knots we carry inside ourselves – and what happens when they start to unravel. A lyric, frightening portrayal of what it means to move through the world in female form.
—— Sue RainsfordThe absorbing stories that make up Frances Leviston's The Voice in My Ear do what fiction does best, swimming deep in complexity and ambivalence. A work of high emotional intelligence and narrative control.
—— Rob DoyleAbsolutely exquisite, combining just the right amount of sweet and sour. The characters in The Voice in my Ear haunted me long after I'd finished reading. Leviston has an uncanny ability to turn a small moment into a kind of meditation on humanity.
—— Jan CarsonThe poet Frances Leviston brings her razor-sharp observations to prose.
—— MonocleThe Bass Rock is a multi-generational modern gothic triumph. It is spectacularly well-observed, profoundly disquieting and utterly riveting. Like all Evie Wyld's work it is startlingly insightful about psychological and physical abuse. It is a haunting, masterful novel.
—— Max PorterA brutal portrait of male violence, as unchanging down the centuries as the coastal rock of the title… Cleverly constructed, full of electric scene-making, and harnessing an eerie energy…the novel ends in hope.
—— Anthony Cummins , iEverything [Evie Wyld] has published has left me excited and slightly (very) envious of her ability… And then came The Bass Rock… Something extremely special… The book takes on an immense power. This is the best book of the #MeToo era… An absolute blinder.
—— Fran Slater , BookmunchVividly told and compelling… The Bass Rock is…beautifully written and powered by blistering force and righteous anger.
—— Alice O'Keefe , BooksellerEvie Wyld is exceptionally good at the gruesome… Her bewitching third novel…The Bass Rock is beautifully written and its particular brand of macabre is all Evie Wyld’s own. The tension, foreboding and sense of inevitability are hard to shake off, even once the final page is turned. Its atmosphere is so powerful that you feel you need to go for a walk afterwards.
—— Cressida Connolly , Literary ReviewA dark, gristly marvel of a novel. The Bass Rock held me in thrall from cover to cover. Evie Wyld is a gothic genius: her narrative of the violence inflicted on women throughout the centuries and the seething, female anger left in its wake left me with a deep sense of disquiet that will doubtless remain for years to come.
—— Hannah KentA fierce novel exploring the subjugation of – and violence against – women through the ages.
—— Hannah Beckerman , ObserverI savoured this wonderful novel; it is so extraordinarily clear-eyed and vivid, sharply disturbing yet deeply compassionate. What an amazing achievement.
—— Megan HunterWonderfully subtle and magnificently savage.
—— Claire FullerEvie Wyld's vivid, visceral writing has long been in a class of its own – and as beautiful as it is terrifying, as moral as it is furious, The Bass Rock is her at her unflinching best.
—— Melissa HarrisonAmazingly good. The Bass Rock will fill the air around you with angry ghosts and you will be glad in their company.
—— Adam FouldsWyld’s The Bass Rock is her third novel and best so far… this is Wyld’s masterpiece – as majestic and monumental as the landmark it’s named after.
—— Alex Preston , Observer, *Books to Look Our For in 2020*A bewitching and atmospheric novel, laced with dread. It reveals the haunted house of society, with its echoes of damaged and extinguished lives, but is also illuminated by beautiful observation about people, and their capacity for both violence and empathy.
—— James ScudamoreI loved The Bass Rock and found it menacing, sophisticated, magical and also very funny – the best book yet by a wonderful writer.
—— Anjali JosephEvie Wyld’s The Bass Rock sounds fascinating… Wyld has a luminous prose style, and to see how she copes with 300 years and Scottish doubleness (or tripleness) is high on my list of “to reads”.
—— Stuart Kelly , Scotland on SundayBeautifully written, [The Bass Rock] is a reminder of female folklore and the power of giving words to women.
—— Stylist *10 glorious new books to buy this March*Ambitious in scope… The physical atmosphere of the Bass Rock and its surroundings are wonderfully evoked… But it is the relationships between women in this tessellated work that triumph... I wholly recommend this book.
—— William Jolt , Tablet, *Novel of the Week*Wyld is often praised for her lyrical prose, and The Bass Rock is most certainly a continuation of this form.
—— Julie Vuong , Skinny[A] dark, beautiful and funny gothic family saga for the #MeToo generation… an atmospheric book that transports you within a few sentences… The tension is always building as the story takes on an otherworldly dimension.
—— Charlotte Cripps , IndependentThe Bass Rock is complex, rich, challenging… Like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, The Bass Rock offers a universal history of subjugation and oppression… Violence…runs through the book like veins in marble… Vivid and gripping.
—— Irish TimesA gripping look at three women's stories across four centuries.
—— Joanne Finney , Good HousekeepingEvie Wyld’s passion for horror shines through in the setting of this novel.
—— Chiara Rimella , MonocleUtterly enthralling… [Wyld’s] eye for human foibles and idiosyncrasy is incredibly sharp, and this novel once again exhibits her bravura way with narrative structure… Dark, disturbing and very sophisticated.
—— William Boyd , Sunday Times[An] intensely absorbing gothic novel, which weaves together the fate of three women across three centuries. That it can also comfortably accommodate episodes of off-the-wall, Fleabag-esque hilarity confirms the acclaimed Wyld's brilliance.
—— Stephanie Cross , Daily Mail *Best of Summer Books*Wyld's thought-provoking plots separate this book from many others on the shelves... Wyld's three narratives are artfully crafted to suit the shifting time frames.
—— Scottish FieldWyld's ingeniously linked narratives weave a haunting tale of fear and defiance.
—— Jane Shilling , Daily MailA novel of such subtlety and hope
—— Ross Raisin, author of A NATURAL , Observer, *Summer Reads of 2022*