Today I’m thrilled to reveal the amazing cover for Mike Brooks’ upcoming fantasy novel The Splinter King, book two in The God-King Chronicles, which is due to be published by Orbit on the 15th July 2021. It’s an unusual situation as the first book in the series – The Black Coast – isn’t out yet (it’s coming very soon, on the 18th February in the UK), but the way I see it this just means we’ve got TWO awesome new fantasy novels in this series to look forward to in 2021! Along with the cover itself, I spoke to Mike to get a few of his thoughts on the artwork and what we can expect from the series as a whole – so read on to find out more.
Now, given that The Black Coast isn’t out yet I want to keep this as spoiler-free as possible. A few folks might have read book one already (I’m looking at you, fellow bloggers and reviewers) but most won’t have, so what I’ll do is show you the gorgeous new cover on its own first, without any details of the plot. You can check that out, along with Mike’s thoughts on the series overall, with no fear of spoilers – and then, if you’re keen, you can keep going and read the synopsis for The Splinter King too (which I’ll put inside a spoiler tag so you can’t even see it accidentally)!
First of all, let’s take a look at the beautiful new cover for The Splinter King – with art from Anato Finnstark and design by Matthew Burne. Click on the image below to expand it, and see the cover in all its glory!
The Splinter King will be released on the 15th July 2021 in paperback, by Orbit Books (RRP: £9.99).
I asked Mike for his thoughts on the artwork, and how it compares to his mental image for this book:
Mike: I like it a lot! I’m a big fan of Anato Finnstark anyway, I think her art is excellent: she’s also done some work for Black Library, as it happens. I think this is really pretty and eye-catching.
It compares quite well, really. None of the cultures of The God-King Chronicles are supposed to be lift-and-drop Western European Medieval, so having buildings that look much more Asian in feel fits quite well. I’ve tried to highlight regional variations, even within any one country, but there are certainly some buildings that have a similar style to these. I often have quite loose ideas of what things look like – I’m not a particularly visual writer – so it was great to see a cover and go “yes, that definitely works”.
Now that you’ve seen the awesome new cover art, let’s have a quick recap on what to expect from the first book in the series – The Black Coast. If you’ve not yet come across The God-King Chronicles then this should whet your appetite!
WAR DRAGONS.
FEARSOME RAIDERS.
A DAEMONIC WARLORD ON THE RISE.
When the citizens of Black Keep see ships on the horizon, terror takes them because they know who is coming: for generations, the keep has been raided by the fearsome clanspeople of Tjakorsha. Saddling their war dragons, Black Keep’s warriors rush to defend their home only to discover that the clanspeople have not come to pillage at all. Driven from their own land by a daemonic despot who prophesises the end of the world, the raiders come in search of a new home…
Meanwhile the wider continent of Narida is lurching toward war. Black Keep is about to be caught in the crossfire – if only its new mismatched society can survive.
That sounds awesome, right?! All it took was the mention of War Dragons and I was on board!
Both books have cover art by Anato Finnstark, and I think the new cover looks particularly nice when viewed side by side with the first book, so here are the two of them together:
Now you know the basics of what this series is about, here’s Mike to talk a bit about what we can expect from The God-King Chronicles in terms of themes and ideas – once again there are no spoilers here, so you can read this without fear if you haven’t yet read The Black Coast.
Mike: The God-King Chronicles has a couple of main themes, one of which is about learning to accept and value diversity and difference. A lot of fantasy novels focus on wars between countries and cultures, and I wanted to write something that was more about cultures learning to coexist. There are many obstacles to that, of course, and things go wrong – sometimes very wrong – along the way, but there’s a central theme of at least some people who want to make it work, even when blades are drawn and war is looming.
The other main theme is exploring ideas of religion. It’s a fairly low-magic world – I was rather inspired by Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles about King Arthur – and much of the magic, supernatural, or religious things are relatively ambiguous. What’s interesting to me in this context is not whether gods are real, or magic is real, but what belief in gods or magic make people do. How much does it matter whether or not a god is real, if people are acting as though it is?
It’s also been great to create my own world, and explore cultures rather more fully than I have done in previous work, whether for Black Library or my Keiko space opera series. One culture has five different genders, for example, and I’ve tried to denote the strict social structure in another by giving them no first-person pronouns. Rather than saying “I”, or “me”, you would say “this man”, “this lord”, “your servant”, or whatever: so whenever you refer to yourself, you indicate your social status in relation to whomever you’re addressing. Which is fine, apart from the fact that it’s a patriarchal society where being a man inherently holds higher status than being a woman, until an outsider from a different culture comes in and starts referring to herself as “this man” simply because she refuses to play by their rules.
I’ve also made an “offscreen” rule for the world, which is that there’s no sexual violence: by which I don’t mean that none takes place on the page, it’s that none takes place at all. I never like reading it, and I certainly don’t like writing about it, and I decided I wasn’t going to even reference it as something that has happened elsewhere, or in the past, so in the end I decided that it just wouldn’t happen. Not because of any religious rule, or anything: it just doesn’t (several men on Twitter got very angry about this, for reasons they never seemed fully able to explain). That actually made it interesting to write in some respects, because suddenly female characters in particular have a different set of priorities, if you don’t have to have them even consider the possibility of intimidation or assault in that way (which isn’t to say that characters are safe from being attacked for other reasons or to other purposes – there’s quite a bit of fighting, all in all).
I’ve tried to create a world and a story with a sense of hope behind it, even if things don’t pan out quite the way they’re expected to, and certainly not perfectly. People do die, tragedies do occur, but I’ve tried to keep an underlying sense that Things Can Get Better.
But the main thing I hope, of course, is that people enjoy it.
So there you go – I don’t know about you, but I think this series is shaping up to be something special!
As I said earlier, there shouldn’t have been any spoilers up to this point. If you’ve read The Black Coast (maybe you’ve had an advance review copy) or you don’t mind a teeny tiny sense of spoilering, however, click the SPOILER header below to see the synopsis of The Splinter King. Otherwise, you can just enjoy this reminder of its great new cover art!
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Thanks so much to Orbit and Mike Brooks for asking me to be part of this cover reveal, and to Mike for contributing his thoughts on the artwork and the series as a whole!
If you would like to find out more about Mike Brooks’ writing, check out his official website – and click here to see all of the reviews and interviews I’ve published for his work on Track of Words.
To finish off, here’s a quick recap of what’s being published and when for The God-King Chronicles. Click on the links below to pre-order both of these books from my store on Bookshop.org*
- Book One: The Black Coast – 18th February 2021
- Book Two: The Splinter King – 15th July 2021
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*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.
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