Amberlight by Sylvia Kelso

Amberlight is peopled with vivid characters that stormed up off the page into permanent residence in my mind and memory, in a unique world, and driving an original plot. If some writers' prose sings, Kelso's is an opera." - Lois McMasters Bujold

"A major new voice in fantasy. Read Sylvia Kelso: she''s great!" -- Rosemary Edghill, author of Paying the Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Other Stories

Sumptuous, sensuous, and passionate, Amberlight is completely delightful. Sylvia Kelso is a master of world-building, beautiful prose, and sheer romance." -- Delia Sherman, co-author of The Fall of the Kings

A city.
A mystery.
An impossible love.

Why would the Head of a great ruling House retrieve a robbed, battered victim left for dead in the streets of the legendary city of Amberlight?

Why would the oracle that guides all House-heads tell her, It matters, if he dies?

What would an outlander stripped of all memory know of cabal and coalition along the River, where Amberlight holds the monopoly of power and wealth?

What threat might he reveal to Amberlight's one, unique possession: the motherlodes of the qherrique; the pearl-rock that gives the River's rulers their most powerful tool?

What could the Head of a great House feel for a nameless stranger, that would make her risk her House and city for his sake?

Is it honor or betrayal that brings war, siege, and the ruin of their every hope?

The answers lie beyond tangles of intrigue and insurrection and brutal warfare, when in the final upheaval they both begin to understand the more-than-human mystery that first brought them together in the streets of Amberlight.

"Speculative fiction in the true meaning. Amberlight casts an unswerving eye on the roles we take for granted and forces us to see that what lies beneath them may not be what it seems. Elizabeth K. Burton, author of Shadow of the Scorpion

Sylvia Kelso was born and lives in North Queensland, Australia, where she was telling stories almost before she could write. She has published poetry in Australian literary magazines and a national anthology, and has a Creative Writing MA for an alternate history/SF novel set in alternate North Queenslands. Her two previous fantasy novels, Everran's Bane and The Moving Water were published in 2005 and 2007. Her fantasies most often use an analogue Australian landscape, where bushfires and gum-trees appear along with dragons, mages and bards. In the Riverworld of Amberlight the gumtrees are less obvious but landscape draws on more southern Australian states. Sylvia teaches at James Cook University in her home town, and has published academic articles on science fiction and fantasy. She lives in a house with a lot of trees but no cats, and likes to play Irish whistle, and sometimes fiddle, with her friends.

Sylvia Kelso's Web site: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~sakelso/