Sons of Darkness
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
THE HOUSE OF THE DRAGON MEETS SUCCESSION IN AN EPIC REIMAGINING OF THE MAHABHARATA
'An unforgettable wild journey set in re-imagined Vedic India' SF Book Review
'Like Game of Thrones in an Indian alternative universe... exhilarating... heralds the arrival of a special new talent' Dan Jones
'Mahabharata imbued with A Song of Ice and Fire, The First Law, & Malazan Book of the Fallen' Novel Notions
SOME BALLADS ARE INKED IN BLOOD
Bled dry by violent confrontations with the Magadhan Empire, the Mathuran Republic simmers on the brink of oblivion. Senator Krishna and his third wife Satyabhama have put their plans in motion, both within and beyond the Republic's blood-soaked borders, to protect it from total annihilation.
But they are soon to discover that neither gold nor alliances last forever – and that they are not the only players on the board.
Mati, Pirate-Princess of Kalinga, has decided to mend her ways and become a good wife. But old habits die hard, especially when one habitually uses murder to settle old scores.
Brooding and beautiful Karna hopes to bury his brutal past, but finds that destiny is a miser when it comes to granting second chances.
Hero-turned-torturer Shakuni limps through a path of daggers. Meanwhile, his foes and woes multiply, leaving little time for vengeance.
Their lives are about to become yet more difficult, as a cast of sinister queens, naive kings, pious assassins and ravenous priests are converging where the Son of Darkness is prophesied to rise... even as forgotten Gods prepare to play their hand.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mohanty debuts with a hefty grimdark fantasy re-telling of the Mahabharata, inspired in part by Game of Thrones. He wisely supplies a list of characters and a map at the front of the novel to help readers wrangle the vast cast of, in Mohanty's words, "real people faced with impossible choices," and the several small kingdoms making up his "Narnia of India." Made up of stories within stories, the tale fleshes out the history of a deadly 10-year war—thousands of years after the fact—and the ensuing fragile armistice between the once wealthy Republic of Mathura and the neighboring totalitarian Magadhan Empire. Now led by handsome former cowherd Krishna, who covertly works to abolish the ancient caste system, Mathura nears the end of its resources while the Empire threatens to resume hostilities, joined by strange allies from across various castes and even ancient Greece. In vivid prose, Mohanty combines ghastly tortures, sly political machinations, throbbing romance, and eerie religious and social rites into a demanding but rewarding epic and sets the stage for even more gasps in a coming sequel. This is an impressive feat.
