WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 45Review_FICTION
spins a twisty, tongue-in-cheek fantasy
that’s part thriller, part action movie,
and wholly irreverent. Vern is an ancient
dragon, possibly the last of his species.
He’s content to drink away his days,
wallowing in self-pity and loneliness,
yearning for his old life as Lord Highfire.
But his quiet, drunken existence in the
Louisiana bayou is upended when he
hires 15-year-old Everett “Squib”
Moreau as his new assistant. Squib’s
tasks mainly consist of delivering Vern’s
vodka and internet purchases. As the
two develop a friendship, Regence
Hooke, a crooked cop with big plans,
sets his sights on them, hoping to use
Vern’s firepower and muscle to expand
his criminal influence. But Vern hasn’t
survived this long without picking up a
few dirty tricks of his own. Colfer’s
catchy narrative voice suits the characters
and their setting perfectly, capturing
Vern’s world-weary nature, Squib’s
youthful adaptability, and Hooke’s
malicious cunning. This no-holds-
barred yarn is good fun from start to
finish. Agent: Sophie Hicks, Sophie Hicks
Agency. (Feb.)
The Shadow Saint
Gareth Hanrahan. Orbit, $16.99 trade paper
(544p) ISBN 978-0-316-52535-0
The epic, surreal second volume in
Hanrahan’s Black Iron Legacy series
(following The Gutter Prayer) mixes
diplomacy, espionage, and religion to
excellent effect. The politically neutral
city of Guerdon serves as a refuge for odd
saints and unclassifiable magical crea-
tures during a raging war between
unhinged deities. Terevant Erevesic, a
lieutenant newly posted to Guerdon as
guard captain at the embassy, is tasked
with securing Guerdon’s god bombs,
weapons powerful enough to level the
field in the
ongoing
Godswar.
Meanwhile,
political opera-
tive Eladora
Duttin works to
drum up votes
for the
Industrial
Liberal party in
the upcoming
You take a unique, idiomatic approach
to rendering Japanese dialogue in
English. How did you come up with
that method?
It arose because I got so annoyed
with the way that Japanese is usually
rendered in English, whether that’s in
translation or in books that are about
Japan. In the West, we tend to roman-
ticize Japanese as a language. We
write it as if it is endlessly proper and
polite, but it really isn’t!
You can be incredibly
rude in Japanese. I would
say it can sound more
brutal to me than English
does. It has slang and it
has this wonderful grit
to it.Tell me about your
research trip to Japan.
In 2013, I got a scholar-
ship from the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese
Foundation. Every year, they send six
or seven people out to Tokyo to spend a
year at a language school. Then you
spend a month with a Japanese family
elsewhere in Japan, and then come
back to Tokyo to work for a Japanese
company. It was weird and great and I
would never have been able to do it if
I hadn’t been sent out by this brilliant
organization.Mori and Thaniel are in love from
the start of the book. What kind of
research went into writing a gay
couple in the 19th century?
I’ve had people say, “Oh, but did
people like this even exist in VictorianEngland?” Well, obviously they did!
There’s not a ton of primary source
material, but my main theory is that
humans are humans through history.
Modern research says that both sexu-
ality and gender exist on a spectrum
and they always have, which means
that there were plenty of gay people in
Victorian England and Victorian any-
where—including Meiji Japan. If you
read Japanese literature, the gay
community was never
stigmatized in quite the
horrific way that it has
been in the West, because
religion is less prescrip-
tive there, so people aren’t
so interested in what goes
on in your own bedroom.Mori, who secretly
orchestrated the move to
Japan, is able to remember
the future and manipulate events to
get the outcome he desires. How do
you keep track of the complicated
threads that arise from this power?
Really clumsily. When I talk to readers,
there’s always one person who says,
“Oh, you must have a chart with strings
and maps.” No, I don’t have a chart. I
just bumble along and try to get it
right. You get used to the idea that, if
you change something on page 60, then
you’re going to have to change some-
thing on page 3, because Mori always
knew it would happen. It’s really
involved and really inefficient, the
process of writing about Mori. I’ve never
had very much confidence that I’ve
actually gotten it right. —Rose Fox[Q&A]
PW Talks with Natasha Pulley
Time After Time
In Pulley’s The Lost Future of Pepperharrow (Bloomsbury, Feb;
reviewed on p. 44), the sequel to The Watchmaker of Filigree Street,
Victorian-era queer couple Thaniel, a translator, and Mori, who
can manipulate the future, travel to Japan.© jamie drew