The Etched City - A Novel

Zusatztext “Combine equal parts of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and Chine Miéville’s  Perdido Street Station!  throw in a dash of Aubrey BeardsleyandJ.K. Huysmans! and you’ll get some idea of this disturbing! decadent first novel.” — Publishers Weekly “The plot! with its stories-within-stories and its offhand descriptions of wonders and prodigies! brings to mind the works of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges.” — Locus Informationen zum Autor K.J. Bishop was born in Melbourne, Australia. Her short stories have been published in Aurealis , Fables and Reflections , Borderlands , Album Zutique #1 , Leviathan 4 , The Alsiso Project , The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Disease s, and the Serbian magazines Polaris and Znack Sagite . The Etched City is her first novel. Klappentext "Combine equal parts of Stephen King's Dark Tower series and Chine Miéville's Perdido Street Station, throw in a dash of Aubrey BeardsleyandJ.K. Huysmans, and you'll get some idea of this disturbing, decadent first novel."-Publishers Weekly Gwynn and Raule are rebels on the run, with little in common except being on the losing side of a hard-fought war. Gwynn is a gunslinger from the north, a loner, a survivor . . . a killer. Raule is a wandering surgeon, a healer who still believes in just-and lost-causes. Bound by a desire to escape the ghosts of the past, together they flee to the teeming city of Ashamoil, where Raule plies her trade among the desperate and destitute, and Gwynn becomes bodyguard and assassin for the household of a corrupt magnate. There, in the saving and taking of lives, they find themselves immersed in a world where art infects life, dream and waking fuse, and splendid and frightening miracles begin to bloom . . . "The plot, with its stories-within-stories and its offhand descriptions of wonders and prodigies, brings to mind the works of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges."-Locus Leseprobe 1 There were no milestones in the Copper Country. Often a traveller could only measure the progress of a journey by the time it took to get from each spoiled or broken thing to the next: a half day's walk from a dry well to the muzzle of a cannon poking out of a sand slope, two hours to reach the skeletons of a man and a mule. The land was losing its battle with time. Ancient and exhausted, it visited decrepitude on everything within its bounds, as though out of spleen. In the south of the country, arid scrubby plains alternated with stretches of desert. One road crossed this region, connecting the infrequent hamlets and oases, following the line of a derelict stone wall built long ago by a warlord. Along it, at distant intervals, were the remains of watchtowers and small forts. The greater part of the wall and its fortifications lay in complete ruin, but occasional sections remained intact enough to provide shelter. One evening, late in the Husk Month, as the sun was getting on towards the horizon and the bite was at last starting to go out of its rays, the road brought the physician Raule to a tower with three standing walls. At this promising sight her dark features lifted out of the scowl they had settled into during the stifling, monotonous afternoon. Earlier that day, she had traded tales with the Harutaim nomads whose way took them along the road, or rather beside it, for they held man-made paths in low esteem. They never camped near the wall, and had cautioned Raule not to do so either. They believed the ruins were haunted by evil spirits, the ancient and acrimonious undead. But Raule preferred the stone places to the empty land outside. Inside the tower she found the ashes of someone else's campfire, a bottle, an empty meat can, and a wad of blood-soiled bandages. She alighted from her camel and left it to gra...

Product details

• Authors: Bishop, K J Bishop, K. J. Bishop, K.J. Bishop, Kristen Bishop
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 23.11.2004
• EAN: 9780553382914
• ISBN: 978-0-553-38291-4
• No. of pages: 400
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 208 mm x 21 mm
• Series: Random House Worlds
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature