Cover Reveal + Prologue: Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor

Good news for the fans of the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy and Laini Taylor (and I know there are a lot of you out there): on September 27th of this year Laini’s new book Strange the Dreamer will be published! It is the first part of a duology and the second book in the series will be called The Muse of Nightmares.

What will Strange the Dreamer be about? According to the Daughter of Smoke and Bone website it’s a story about this:

The aftermath of a war between gods and men.
A mysterious city stripped of its name.
A mythic hero with blood on his hands.
A young librarian with a singular dream.
A girl every bit as perilous as she is imperiled.
Alchemy and blood candy, nightmares and godspawn, moths and monsters, friendship and treachery, love and carnage.
Welcome to Weep.

I mean, if that doesn’t get you excited…

But there’s more! Every fan is always eager to find out what the cover of their highly anticipated books will look like. Wonder no more, because here it is (UK cover) and it’s absolutely gorgeous!

And if even that wasn’t enough, we’ve got another treat for you. You can read the prologue of the book right here!

Prologue

On the second sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.

Her skin was blue, her blood was red.

She broke over an iron gate, crimping it on impact, and there she hung, impossibly arched, graceful as a temple dancer swooning on a lover’s arm. One slick finial anchored her in place. Its point, protruding from her sternum, glittered like a brooch. She fluttered briefly as her ghost shook loose, and then her hands relaxed, shedding fistfuls of freshly picked torch ginger buds.

Later, they would say these had been hummingbird hearts and not blossoms at all.

They would say she hadn’t shed blood but wept it. That she was lewd, tonguing her teeth at them, upside down and dying, that she vomited a serpent that turned to smoke when it hit the ground. They would say a flock of moths had come, frantic, and tried to lift her away.

That was true. Only that.

They hadn’t a prayer, though. The moths were no bigger than the startled mouths of children, and even dozens together could only pluck at the strands of her darkening hair until their wings sagged, sodden with her blood. They were purled away with the blossoms as a grit-choked gust came blasting down the street. The earth heaved underfoot. The sky spun on its axis. A queer brilliance lanced through billowing smoke, and the people of Weep had to squint against it. Blowing grit and hot light and the stink of saltpeter. There had been an explosion. They might have died, all and easily, but only this girl had, shaken from some pocket of the sky.

Her feet were bare, her mouth stained damson. Her pockets were all full of plums. She was young and lovely and surprised and dead.

She was also blue.

Blue as opals, pale blue. Blue as cornflowers, or dragonfly wings, or a spring—not summer—sky.

Someone screamed. The scream drew others. The others screamed, too, not because a girl was dead, but because the girl was blue, and this meant something in the city of Weep. Even after the sky stopped reeling, and the earth settled, and the last fume spluttered from the blast site and dispersed, the screams went on, feeding themselves from voice to voice, a virus of the air.

The blue girl’s ghost gathered itself and perched, bereft, upon the spearpoint-tip of the projecting finial, just an inch above her own still chest. Gasping in shock, she tilted back her invisible head and gazed, mournfully, up.

The screams went on and on.

And across the city, atop a monolithic wedge of seamless, mirror-smooth metal, a statue stirred, as though awakened by the tumult, and slowly lifted its great horned head.

(©Laini Taylor, STRANGE THE DREAMER, out September 2016 by Hodder & Stoughton)