Latest Content

Stories We Loved
  • The Unbroken
  • The Jasmine Throne
  • The Broken God
  • A Little Hatred
  • In Other Lands
  • The Pursuit of William Abbey
  • Bone Shard Daughter
  • Brother Red
  • The Midnight Bargain
  • A Master of Djinn
  • She Who Became the Sun
  • The Bone Ship's Wake
  • A Marvellous Light
  • Miss Percy
  • Ruin of Kings
  • The Black Hawks
  • The Black Coast
  • Eightpenny Woods
  • MEM
  • Smoke Eaters
  • Wolf in the Whale
  • One of Us
  • The Infinite Noise
  • Lexicon
  • The Thousand Names
  • The Wolf of Oren-yaro
  • We Ride the Storm
  • The Wandering Inn
  • Siren Queen
  • A Prayer for the Crown-Shy
  • The Once and Future Nerd
  • The Thirteenth Hour
  • Small Miracles

The Thirteenth Hour by Trudie Skies

The Thirteenth Hour was the highest-scoring book from The Fantasy Inn’s SPFBO team this year, and it isn’t hard to see why! With a setting that brings to mind memories of Final Fantasy VII, a found-family crew of godless heathens, a magic-heavy revolution, and more than its fair share of romance and feelings… this book has it all. One of the most exciting and fantasy novels we’ve read in years.

Read the review

Podcast Episodes

Author Interviews

Visit our Friends

Book 1
Book 2
Book 3
Book 4
Book 5
Book 6

Opinion Pieces

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
— Terry Pratchett, Diggers
Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.
— Terry Pratchett, Jingo
For fuck’s sake Andrew. Is there anything in this scenario that feels heterosexual or well-adjusted to you?
— Lee Mandelo, Summer Sons
My name is Jean Tannen, and I’m the ambush.
— Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora
Murder is not the answer to every question.
— Sangu Mandanna, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
The way people are treating this, you’d think decapitation was just a natural event that happens sometimes, as if people’s heads tumble off like leaves in autumn.
— T. Kingfisher, Paladin’s Grace
Hi, you’re very sexy, incidentally I’m a berserker and if you touch me during a nightmare I’ll break your arm, wanna bone?
— T. Kingfisher, Paladin’s Hope
“Home is people,” she says to Asael, softly. Asael blinks. “Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.”
— N.K Jemisin, The Fifth Season
It is a choice between drowning in the same river that has dragged me down a thousand times or walking into a pit of fire that has never burned me once, I will choose the flames and learn to bear it.
— Ava Reid, The Woof and the Woodsman
I’d like to introduce my fists to whoever taught you to stop talking about the things that interest you.
— Freya Markse, A Marvellous Light
I will not be your tool or your weapon. I will be your equal.
— Tasha Suri, The Jasmine Throne
Power can be looking after people. Keeping them safe, instead of putting them into danger.
— Tasha Suri, The Jasmine Throne
Dream up something wild and improbable,” she pleaded. “Something beautiful and full of monsters.”
— Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer
Just because there are no ghosts it doesn’t mean you can’t be haunted.
— Silvia Moreno Garcia, Mexican Gothic
It’s a profoundly strange feeling, to stumble across someone whose desires are shaped so closely to your own, like reaching toward your reflection in a mirror and finding warm flesh under your fingertips.
— Alix Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January
When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.
— Robin Hobb, Assassin’s Apprentice
Why does our innovation never extend to our conscience?”
— Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends
I have eaten the chocolate. To the future me that reads this: I am sorry. It was delicious.
— Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx
The gaps in a library are like footprints in the sand; they show us where others have gone before; they assure us we are not alone.
— Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx
No one admires the bird who sings over the orchestra.
— Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx
The nobles are uniformly awful.
— Josiah Bancroft, The Hod King
I would not mind you in my head, if you were not so clearly mad.
— Robert Jordan, The Path of Daggers (The Wheel of Time #8)
You’re still alive, aren’t you? Then you’ve got the chance to do better next time. Doing better next time. That’s what life is.
— Joe Abercrombie, Before They are Hanged
“Do you know how easy it is, Fitz, to follow a man you believe in?”
He looked up at last to meet my eyes.
“My prince,” I said quietly. “I believe I do.”
— Robin Hobb, Royal Assassin
I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time War
“But it’s not supposed to be easy, losing someone. If it were, we wouldn’t care enough to try to keep them. Best we can do is try.”
“So we can feel less guilty?”
“So we’re not afraid to care about each other.”
— Michelle West, House Name (The House War #3)
He wondered if magic was, in any sense, truly magical to those who labored with it.
— Michelle West, The Hidden City
Miracles aren’t believed, even by those to whom they happen.
— Anne Rice, The Mummy
“Ninety percent of all problems are caused by people being assholes.”
“What causes the other ten percent?” asked Kizzy.
“Natural disasters,” said Nib.
— Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
If the only thing you’re going to respect is strength, Kip, first, you’re a fool, and second, you’ve come to the right man.
— Brent Weeks, The Black Prism
The horses were allowed to shit wherever they wanted…
— Devin Madson, We Ride the Storm
If books are traps, then let them be like terrariums: sealed up and still living miniatures of the world.
— Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx
What stupid, selfish stories people told themselves! Poison leaked into their hearts as they smiled with condescension, thinking their view of the world to be the only right one.
— Kate Elliott, Black Wolves
Every story begins this way: at the instant when lives touch.
— Kate Elliott, Black Wolves
I know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused. There are no monsters. The monster is us.
— Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
That was what the Empire did: forced you to be complicit in the dehumanization of others.
— Laura Lam & Elizabeth May, Seven Devils
That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you’d been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for.
— Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House
For a very brief period I was happy, and, an even rarer gift, I knew I was happy.
— Robin Hobb, Assassin’s Apprentice
No one likes change unless he makes it himself. Then it’s innovation.
— Sherwood Smith, Inda
It is a shame when we must regard a people as an enemy. It is a shame and a regret when the two peoples share so much. And it is a shame, a regret, and a tragedy when those peoples meet as individuals and find much to admire.
— Sherwood Smith, King’s Shield (Inda #3)
When men govern according to their own petty concerns, rather than for the good of all mankind, then war becomes an inevitability.
— Will Wight, Of Sea and Shadow
War is a convenient fix for government problems if it happens somewhere else. To other people.
— Sherwood Smith, Treasons Shore (Inda #4)
In our grand successes over the past century we have invented a monster called a middle class. Our predecessors pillaged the Ashen Sea, and now the people are accustomed to receiving that pillage. And they are accustomed to their innocence.
— Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade #2)
One thing the monks taught me was that history is not a line; it is a spiral. We don’t repeat moments in time, but we come back around, echoing them.
— Andrea Stewart, The Bone Shard Emperor (The Drowning Empire #2)
“A song isn’t impenetrable armor. They write songs about dead people too, you know.”
“But are they quite so catchy?
— Andrea Stewart, The Bone Shard Emperor (The Drowning Empire #2)
We are cursed to be the sum of our deeds, black as they may be. They are like an arrow: once the shot is made, there is no escaping the consequences.
— RJ Barker, Blood of Assassins (The Wounded Kingdom #2)
I did not for one moment long to be alone; in fact, my loneliness was as much a prison as this brig is. I simply longed for someone who would let me be as I wished to be.
— RJ Barker, Call of the Bone Ships (The Tide Child #2)
I just am. That’s how it works. You don’t get to choose to be someone. You just are. Even if you’re not special. Even if you don’t want to be. You just are.
— Pirateaba, The Wandering Inn Volume 1
It could be flour. Or — alternatively, it could be cocaine.
— Pirateaba, The Wandering Inn Volume 1
Okay. You’ve officially made the most horrible thing in existence. Undead spiders. Good for you. Now take it out of my inn.
— Pirateaba, The Wandering Inn Volume 2
People do not know what to make of me, and this pleases me. I don’t want to be scrutable.
— Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts
But Gideon was experiencing one powerful emotion: being sick of everyone’s shit.
— Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth
Revenge was the best revenge.
— Essa Hansen, Nophek Gloss
He laughed, and I caught my breath at the sound. I wished I was funny, just to hear him laugh again.
— C.L. Polk, Witchmark
I never told her how she had saved me. I never told her how she became the dearest friend I’d ever had. I tol her I loved her, but never enough. My Edith of the sparrows. My heart. My world.
— C.L. Polk, Even Though I Knew the End
If I can only use my magic when you deem it safe, does that magic belong to me, or you?
— C.L. Polk, The Midnight Bargain
You touched people’s lives, glancingly, and those lives changed forever.
— Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan
I think that I should know you in a pitch black room. I think I would know you anywhere near me in the world.
— Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan
There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.
— Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana
No tyrant could thrive where every subject said 10. The tyrant thrives when the first fucking fool salutes.
— Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds (Malazan Book of the Fallen #8)
Ambition is not a dirty word. Piss on compromise. Go for the throat.
— Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon
The funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.
— Lev Grossman, The Magician King (The Magicians, #2
“What is belonging?” we ask.
She says, “Where loneliness ends.”
— Rivers Solomon, The Deep
It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
— Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
— Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do l,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
“Someday, Locke Lamora, someday, you’re going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light up and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope I’m still around to see it.”
“Oh please,” said Locke. “It’ll never happen.”
— Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora
Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.
— N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season
Ugh, emotions.
— Martha Wells, Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries #5)
Destroying what someone else cherished never brought back what you yourself had lost. All it did was spread grief like a contagion.
— Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun (The Radiant Emperor #1)
Denying desire only made yourself vulnerable to those who were smart enough to see what you couldn’t even acknowledge to yourself.
— Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun (The Radiant Emperor #1)
That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.
— R.F. Kuang, Babel
This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.
— R.F. Kuang, Babel
“Be selfish,” he whispered. “Be brave.”
— R.F. Kuang, Babel
Girl, every choice we make is a new tomorrow. Whole worlds waiting to be born.
— P. Djèlí Clark, Ring Shout
You see, the hate they give is senseless. They already got power. Yet they hate those over who they got control, who don’t really pose a threat to them. Their fears aren’t real-just insecurities and inadequacies. Deep down they know that.
— P. Djèlí Clark, Ring Shout
Being close to her was like being warmed by bonfire, and I had been cold for a long time.
— Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune
I am the only storm that matters now, and there is no shelter from what I bring.
— Rebecca Roanhorse, Black Sun
Why try to educate those who cared not to learn?
— Rebecca Roanhorse, Black Sun
Almost dead yesterday, maybe dead tomorrow, but alive, gloriously alive, today.
— Robert Jordan, The Fires of Heaven (Wheel of Time #5)
She was here because she was a soldier. A fighter. She didn’t know anything else, and she was good at it…It would be the death of her, but she’d always expected that.
— C.L. Clark, The Unbroken
Touraine was starting to think it was impossible to come from one land and learn to live in another and feel whole. That you would always stand on shaky, hole-ridden ground, half of your identity dug out of you and tossed away.
— C.L. Clark, The Unbroken
But I have no faith in love. Love cannot save me.
I choose vengeance.
— Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow
Love isn’t some scarce resource to battle over. Love can be infinite, as much as your heart can open.
— Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow
Niceness is all about what we do when other people are looking. Kindness, on the other hand, runs deep. Kindness is what happens when no one’s looking.
— Sangu Mandanna, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
It’s not always enough to go looking for the place we belong. Sometimes we need to make that place.
— Sangu Mandanna, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
It’s a leap of faith to love people and let yourself be loved. It’s closing your eyes, stepping off a ledge into nothing, and trusting that you’ll fly rather than fall. I can’t step off the ledge for you. It’s something only you can do.
— Sangu Mandanna, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
You will never remember the great if you do not remember the small.
— Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune
“Screw you, Hilo,” she snapped. “I can kill my ex-boyfriends myself.”
— Fonda Lee, Jade City
“I’m too busy trying to quell a rebellion started by her people.”
“A rebellion started by her people to protest the fact that we came and invaded in the first place. Your Highness.”
— C.L. Clark, The Unbroken
Rage, and its consequences, are what we get when the world refuses to change for anything less.
— Evan Winter, The Fires of Vengeance (The Burning #2)
“Your brother does keep fucking the men, but so far they have stubbornly refused to get with child,” Natan said, swirling his wine.
“He supposes he will just have to try harder.”
— Mike Brooks, The Black Coast
People who’ve had it good don’t tend to like it when others suddenly start having it good too, or don’t have to beg and bow to get it.”
— Mike Brooks, The Black Coast
“I think,” says Eladora, “that we should talk to Cari.”
“She tried to stab me.”
“Yes, that does sound like her.”
— Gareth Hanrahan, The Shadow Saint (The Black Iron Legacy #2)
A short time later, and with very little fanfare, Chel found himself sworn into the service of Prince Tarfel Merimonsun of Vistirlar, under oath to serve, honour and protect. Especially protect. The whole thing felt oddly close to marriage.
— David Wragg, The Black Hawks
When you can’t fill a hole with goodness, fill it with filth. Paint it over. There. Just like new.
— Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland
Our time in this galaxy is, as you have constantly reminded us, limited. We will no longer waste it on waiting for you to do what is right.
— Becky Chambers, The Galaxy and the Ground Within (Wayfarers #4)
I was a grown man, damn it, and a mage of Agatos. Armies fled before me. Demons quaked in fear. Small animals gave me a wide berth. Babies cried when I smiled at them.
— Patrick Samphire, Shadow of a Dead God
Sometimes you need a little revolution to make a lot of good.
— Robert Jackson Bennett, Foundryside
She smiles. It is a smile with a little sadness in it. But she still wears the perfume — the first thing I ever knew of her — and it still makes me think of Sunlight and Happiness.
— Susanna Clarke, Piranesi
But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad.
— V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives — or to find strength in a very long one.
— V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

Reviews