The Failures
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
Screenrant 10 Most Anticipated Books in Sci-fi Coming Out in July
BookBub All the Science Fiction and Fantasy Books You Need To Read Right Now
"Liar’s writing is like the world it depicts: a finely-tuned piece of clockwork…the sort of book I could read again and again." —Christopher Ruocchio, internationally award-winning author of the Sun Eater novels
From a debut voice comes a genre-breaking blend of apocalyptic sci-fi and epic fantasy about a scattered group of unlikely heroes traveling across their broken mechanical planet to stave off eternal darkness. A tightly-coiled puzzle of a thrill ride, The Failures launches The Wanderlands trilogy
Welcome to the Wanderlands.
A vast machine made for reasons unknown, the Wanderlands was broken long ago. First went the sky, splintering and cracking, and then very slowly, the whole machine—the whole world—began to go dark.
Meet the Failures.
Following the summons of a strange dream, a scattering of adventurers, degenerates, and children find themselves drawn toward the same place: the vast underground Keep. They will discover there that they have been called for a purpose—and that purpose could be the destruction of everything they love.
The end is nigh.
For below the Keep, imprisoned in the greatest cage ever built by magicians and gods, lies the buried Giant. It is the most powerful of its kind, and its purpose is the annihilation of all civilization. But any kind of power, no matter how terrible, is precious in the dimming Wanderlands, and those that crave it are making their moves.
All machines can be broken, and the final cracks are spreading. It will take only the careless actions of two cheerful monsters to tip the Wanderlands towards an endless dark...or help it find its way back to the light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Liar debuts with an ambitious, genre-bending tale set on a perpetually dark postapocalyptic planet called the Wanderlands. As a child, Sophie Vesachai had a strange, prophetic dream that appeared to instruct her to retrieve ancient artifacts, free the imprisoned giant Kindaedystrin, and thus restore the realm's light. As an adult, she discovers that others across the Wanderlands had the same exact dream and forms a ragtag group she calls the Killers, "a gang devoted to discovering the meaning and purpose behind the dream." The only thing uniting these misfits is the visions, making for some shaky group dynamics as they set out to free Kindaedystrin from the Keep, a vast underground fortress. But Queen Jane Guin, the Keep's leader, has her own plans for Kindaedystrin: she aims to kill the giant, believing that this alone will restore light to the Wanderlands. As Sophie and Jane clash, Liar digs deep into the characters' psyches through fragmentary narration that toggles between the past and the present. This occasionally creates confusion, but Liar ties up the plot's many threads by the end. The worldbuilding, meanwhile, offers a heady mix of magic and science. The result is a dense but worthwhile adventure.
