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Read a deleted scene from The Girl With all the Gifts

If you’re one of the thousands of readers who have read and loved this year’s most original and heartbreaking thriller, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS, then you already know what a special girl Melanie is. But what you read wasn’t the whole story.

We have a secret extra scene, set after the events of THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS, to share with you. To read it, all you have to do is share Melanie’s story with your friends via the social network of your choice and you’ll receive the chapter absolutely free. Click the ‘Pay with a Tweet’ button below to get started.

You already know Melanie’s secret.

Now it’s time to share her gift.

 

The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey   Carey_GWATG_HC_revs

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS by M.R. Carey is out now in paperback in the UK and Australia and in hardcover in the US. E-book and audio editions are available in all countries.

Five Things I Learned Co-Writing Prequels to Ender’s Game

If you were to ask me to list my five favorite novels of all time, I’d probably give a slightly different answer every year. I’m always discovering something new and glorious that blows my mind and leaves me in a giddy state of wonder. But one book that will never leave that list is Ender’s Game. In fact, it’s currently perched there at the number one spot, and I doubt anything will ever unseat it.

I’m not alone in this. For millions of readers, reading Ender’s Game was a transformative experience. It taught us that characters in a book don’t have to feel like characters in a book. They can feel like real, genuine friends.

That was my experience, anyway. Ender and Valentine and Bean and Dink. It’s like I knew these kids and felt a connection to them. Our hearts were knit together, as the saying goes.

So when Orson Scott Card invited me to join him in writing prequel novels to Ender’s Game, I was a little gun shy. I worried that fans would be expecting another Ender’s Game and that if our novels didn’t transform them and wow them as much as the original, they’d crinkle their noses and hate me for life.

Remember when George Lucas announced that he was going to make The Phantom Menace? I went fanboy bonkers. Another Star Wars movie? Glory hallelujah! I couldn’t believe it. I’m going to sit in a theater again and have an experience just like I had watching the originals.

And then the movie came out and it was, um, less than what I had hoped.

Is this the curse of all prequels, I wondered.

Scott Card put my mind at ease reminding me that we weren’t writing Ender’s Game. That isn’t the goal. This is something different.

So I dived in, and learned quite a bit along the way . . . (more…)

CIBOLA BURN is available now and a big announcement!

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CIBOLA BURN (US | UK | AUS) is on sale today in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook. James Holden and crew are back in the fourth book of James S.A. Corey’s sensational Expanse series. They’ll face a host of new challenges on the wild frontier of uncharted space now that mankind has freed itself from the confines of its solar system.

Starting this week, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (the writing duo behind the James S.A. Corey pseudonym) will be on tour. Visit the James S.A. Corey Facebook page to see if they’re coming to a town near you.

What’s more, we have some incredible news to announce today that will be sure to please all of you. Check out our press release below. (more…)

The Delight of New Voices

SHATTERED (UK | ANZ), the brand new Iron Druid Chronicles novel from Kevin Hearne is released today. Read a guest post below from Kevin about what it was like to write it . . .

When you write a first-person series for a few years you start to hear voices – other voices than your main character, that is. To let those voices tell their own story you have to give them their own chapters, and I began that process in the sixth book of the Iron Druid Chronicles, HUNTED ( UK | AUS). That was the first time Atticus’s former apprentice, Granuaile, had a few chapters to herself. The change from Atticus was lovely as an injection of variety but I quickly realized that the new point of view allowed me to develop both Granuaile and Atticus in ways not previously available.

The experiment worked so well (for me, anyway) that I expanded the practice in SHATTERED. We still get plenty of Atticus and Oberon in the seventh installment of the Iron Druid Chronicles, but Granuaile gets equal time and so does Atticus’s old archdruid, who goes by the modern name of Owen Kennedy. Writing in three very different voices was a delightful challenge for me and I enjoyed exploring their musings on the nature of power and how it should be employed. I also enjoyed making all of them very uncomfortable.

Both Granuaile and Owen have to adjust to a very different life from the one they led before. Granuaile must carefully choose her path now that she’s been bound to the earth and possesses great power, while Owen, brought forward two thousand years into the future, must struggle to adapt to a completely alien culture and level of technology. And Atticus, normally so confident in his abilities, learns that he missed some key facts and the true situation with the gods bears little resemblance to what he thought it was.

Writing from three first-person views—alternating between chapters—also forced me to write in a nonlinear fashion. I discovered that when I tried to write in order it was slow going, because each voice had its own verbal tics and style and switching between them required a mental adjustment. Once I ditched the idea that I had to write from beginning to end, work proceeded much faster. I would write three Owen chapters or four Granuaile chapters and stay in those voices for days, piecing them together in order later. And because of that I managed to finish writing the book in only five months, which for me is quite fast. (And I know that some speedy readers out there will finish the book in a single day and then ask, “When’s the next one?” at which point I will weep and clutch a teddy bear.)

I hope everyone will enjoy getting to know Granuaile and Owen a bit better and appreciate the light they shed on Atticus as well. Many thanks to you all for reading; I do hope to get across the pond someday to meet you.

 

SHATTERED is available now to buy in the UK and Australia.

The most talked about new release of 2014

The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey
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With supporters from Joss Whedon and Martina Cole to Lucy Mangan and Jenny Colgan, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS is definitely a strong contender for this year’s most talked about book.

We’ve gathered a selection of the immense praise it’s had since hardcover publication in the UK in January, but there’s plenty more where that came from. Out in paperback this week in the UK, and released in beautiful hardcover in the US last week, we can’t keep track of how many people are expressing their love for this book.

If you’ve not read it yet, visit the official Facebook page or read the first chapter today and discover Melanie’s secret for yourself.

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BLOOD SONG – Epic Unleashed in Audio!

Great news for fantasy fans who prefer to listen to tales of epic adventure, rather than reading them: BLOOD SONG is now available as an audio download!

Anthony Ryan’s powerful novel took the fantasy world by storm last summer, receiving huge critical acclaim and going on to become the UK’s bestselling epic fantasy debut in 2013.

Now audio fans can get in on the action and follow Vaelin Al Sorna’s journey, as he progresses from a callow youth to someone you really wouldn’t want to find yourself in a swordfight with.

BLOOD SONG is epic fantasy in every sense of the word, featuring everything we love about the genre: intense battles, shady politics and mysterious powers. Oh, and a bad-tempered horse.

You can listen to a sample of the BLOOD SONG audio edition below:

TOWER LORD, the highly-anticipated sequel to BLOOD SONG, will be released in audio next month – alongside the hardback and ebook editions.

Praise for BLOOD SONG:

‘A tremendous debut . . . Fast-paced, action-packed and character-driven’ – Fantasy Book Critic

‘An utterly engrossing high fantasy epic from a major new talent’ – Buzzfeed

‘A top contender for most impressive debut of the year’ – SFFWorld

‘Epic fantasy at its best’ – BookBag

‘An instant sensation’ – Read Dream Relax

On the road with THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS

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THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS releases today in the US in hardcover, and will be out in paperback in the UK next week in (June 19th). Read the first ten chapters on Facebook or listen to a sample from the audiobook.

We know you’ll be hooked by Melanie’s heart-stopping story. M.R. Carey joins us today to tell you more about that journey.

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I don’t know why I ended up writing a road movie. I almost never watch them.

I’ll make some exceptions to that blanket statement. I love Sideways. And Midnight Run. And if we’re counting yellow brick road movies, The Wizard of Oz is pretty damn cool.

It’s just that I’ve seen so many features where changing the scenery stands in for any kind of thought-through development in either the characters or the plot. Stories where it really is just one damn thing after another, episodes piled on episodes until you get to a slightly bigger episode that you realise (after the credits roll) must have been the climax.

If you’re still with me, you’re probably already compiling your own mental list of great road movies. “Hey, fool, you forgot O Brother Where Art Thou, Easy Rider, Wild At Heart…” And yeah, I did. For the sake of my argument, I’m willing to overlook a certain amount of inconvenient evidence.

Can we agree on one thing? When you take a story that depends on a fixed setting and works well within that setting, and for no reason other than variety being the spice of life you wilfully take it out on the road, you’re flirting with disaster. The very phrase “jumping the shark”, after all, comes from that terrible Happy Days episode where the whole gang goes off to Los Angeles and hangs out on a beach.

A long while back I read an essay by the French media guru Roland Barthes in which he talked about the appeal of utopias in fiction. Barthes claimed that most utopias are finite, enclosed spaces – “idealised caves” – that satisfy our need for security by providing an environment where stability is absolute and guaranteed. He made it clear, though, that this enclosure didn’t have to be a physical thing. The classic sit-com, he argued, is utopian because it presents situations and relationships that are entirely resistant to change. One of his favourite examples of a utopian world was that of the Carry On movies, the mildly smutty British comedies of the 60s and 70s in which a cast of beloved character actors would mount a series of gag sketches in a historical setting, effectively playing the same roles no matter whether we were in Cleopatra’s Egypt, the Khyber Pass or the London of Jack the Ripper. (more…)

EARTH AWAKENS – the latest Ender book is out

Today we release EARTH AWAKENS (UK | ANZ) the third novel in the stunning First Formic Wars series. Co-written by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston, it tells what happened in the run up to the events in the bestselling classic novel ENDER’S GAME.

I love this series – it’s just so readable. And not just for all those people who are already big fans of the Ender books. It also works as a fast-paced science fiction adventure in itself. The story just whizzes by and the action doesn’t let up at any point. It’s fascinating to see how humanity’s strategies develop in our first hostile encounter with an alien race.

This latest book has already been receiving some very high praise, with Publishers Weekly claiming:

‘This breakneck thriller is a dark and lively addition to the Enderverse’

Check out the copy below, and look out for EARTH AWAKENS in stores now.

TIME IS RUNNING OUT FOR HUMANITY

It is one hundred years before the events of Ender’s Game. Tens of millions are dead in China as the invading Formics scour the landscape and gas cities with a lethal alien chemical. Young Mazer Rackham and the Mobile Operations Police scramble to find a counteragent, while asteroid miner Victor Delgado infiltrates the alien ship in near-Earth orbit.

Victor needs to find a way to seize the ship and end the war, but he’ll need a small strike force of highly skilled soldiers to pull it off. In this last-ditch effort to save what’s left of humanity, Mazer Rackham and his team may be just the men for the job . . .

Calling Kevin Hearne fans! Do you have a question for the author of the Iron Druid Chronicles?

On 17th June, we release SHATTERED, the brand new Iron Druid Chronicles book by Kevin Hearne. It’s urban fantasy at its most exciting, fast-paced and just darn witty.

To celebrate the release, we wanted to ask Kevin what it was like writing the new book, what fans can expect from it, and what he and Oberon the adorable Irish Wolfhound are up to in general.

But then we thought – WAIT!! – there are thousands of fans out there who might love to ask Kevin (or Oberon) something themselves.

So we’re giving fans in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand the chance to submit your own interview questions to one of the loveliest authors on the planet (FACT). You can do so by filling in the form below before next Friday. Then Kevin (or Oberon!!) will answer the best ones right here on the Orbit site in a week or two.

We’ll also randomly select one winner from all those who send us questions. This winner will receive five free copies of their favourite Iron Druid Chronicles book. These will be perfect to gift to your friends, neighbours and local occult practitioners, helping to spread the love of Atticus O’Sullivan even further . . .

Fill out the form below with your question:

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