Bøker av Jo Walton

'It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.'Fifteen-year-old Morwenna lives in Wales with her twin sister and a mother who spins dark magic for ill. One day, Mori and her mother fight a powerful, magical battle that kills her sister and leaves Mori crippled. Devastated, Mori flees to her long-lost father in England. Adrift, outcast at boarding school, Mori retreats into the worlds she knows best: her magic and her books. She works a spell to meet kindred souls and continues to devour every fantasy and science fiction novel she can lay her hands on. But danger lurks... She knows her mother is looking for her and that when she finds her, there will be no escape.

Tor Essentials presents new editions of science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure. In 1941 the European war ended in the Farthing Peace, a rapprochement between Britain and Nazi Germany. The balls and banquets of Britain's upper classes never faltered, while British ships ferried "undesirables" across the Channel to board the cattle cars headed east.In three brilliant novels set between the late 1940s and the early 1960s of this alternate world, Jo Walton explores how a free society can become an unfree one, how easily traditional powers-that-be can accommodate themselves to tyranny, and what a difference a few courageous men and women can make. Alternately charming, heartstopping, and astonishingly deft, this trilogy is a work of total relevance to our modern age.This new Tor Essentials edition of the Small Change trilogy includes a new introduction by J. Bradford de Long, author of Slouching Toward Utopia and one-time Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.

Finalist for 2017 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult LiteratureFor the first time, Jo Walton's critically acclaimed, genre-defying trilogy Thessaly-The Just City, The Philosopher Kings, and Necessity-is available in softcover, in a single-volume trade paperback omnibusThe goddess Athena thought she was creating a utopia. Populate the island of Thera with extraordinary men, women, and children from throughout history, and watch as the mortals forge a harmonious society based on the tenets of Plato's Republic.Meanwhile, following his famous spurning by a nymph, Athena's ever-curious brother Apollo has decided to live a mortal human life on the island, in an effort to gain a better understanding of humanity. But as both Athena and Apollo soon discover, even the Just City is susceptible to the iron law that nothing ever happens as planned. And there are sins in Paradise, mortal and divine, far graver than the everyday ones.In an epic encompassing sandy Mediterranean shores and the farthest reaches of the galaxy, Victorian England and Renaissance Italy, gods and humans argue, fight, love, and most of all, learn from one another, in critically-acclaimed author Jo Walton's unique exploration of the human condition,Thessaly.

From acclaimed, award-winning author Jo Walton: The Philosopher Kings, a tale of gods and humans, and the surprising things they have to learn from one another

'Here in the Just City you will become your best selves. You will learn and grow and strive to be excellent.' One day, in a moment of philosophical puckishness, the time-travelling goddess Pallas Athene decides to put Plato to the test and create the Just City. She locates the City on a Mediterranean island and populates it with over ten thousand children and a few hundred adults from all eras of history . . . along with some handy robots from the far human future. Meanwhile, Apollo - stunned by the realization that there are things that human beings understand better than he does - has decided to become a mortal child, head to Athene's City and see what all the fuss is about.Then Socrates arrives, and starts asking troublesome questions.What happens next is a tale only the brilliant Jo Walton could tell.

The day Mark called, Patricia Cowan s world split in two.The phone call. His question. Her answer. A single word. Yes. No. It is 2015 and Patricia Cowan is very old. Confused today read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War those things are solid in her memory. Then that phone call and her memory splits in two.She was Trish, a housewife and mother of four.She was Pat, a successful travel writer and mother of three.She remembers living her life as both women, so very clearly. Which memory is real or are both just tricks of time and light?My Real Children is the story of both of Patricia Cowan s lives each with its loves and losses, sorrows and triumphs, its possible consequences. It is a novel about how every life means the entire world.

In 1941 the European war ended in the Farthing Peace, a rapprochement between Britain and Nazi Germany. The balls and banquets of Britain's upper class never faltered, while British ships ferried undesirables across the Channel to board the cattle cars headed east. Peter Carmichael is commander of the Watch, Britain's distinctly British secret police. It's his job to warn the Prime Minister of treason, to arrest plotters, and to discover Jews. The midnight knock of a Watchman is the most dreaded sound in the realm. Now, in 1960, a global peace conference is convening in London, where Britain, Germany, and Japan will oversee the final partition of the world. Hitler is once again on British soil. So is the long exiled Duke of Windsor - and the rising gangs of British Power streetfighters, who consider the Government soft, may be the former king's bid to stage a coup d' tat. Amidst all this, two of the most unlikely persons in the realm will join forces to oppose the fascists: a debutante whose greatest worry until now has been where to find the right string of pearls, and the Watch Commander himself.

Eight years after they overthrew Churchill and led Britain into a separate peace with Hitler, the upper-crust families of the Farthing set are gathered for a weekend retreat. Among them is estranged Farthing scion Lucy Kahn, who can't understand why her and her husband David's presence was so forcefully requested. Then the country-house idyll is interrupted when the eminent Sir James Thirkie is found murdered - with a yellow Star of David pinned to his chest.Lucy begins to realize that her Jewish husband is about to be framed for the crime - an outcome that would be convenient for altogether too many of the various political machinations underway in Parliament in the coming week. But whoever's behind the murder, and the frame-up, didn't reckon on the principal investigator from Scotland Yard being a man with very private reasons for sympathizing with outcasts and underdogs - and prone to look beyond the obvious as a result.As the trap slowly shuts on Lucy and David, they begin to see a way out - a way fraught with peril in a darkening world.

Jo Walton is an award-winning author of, inveterate reader of, and chronic re-reader of science fiction and fantasy books. What Makes This Book So Great? is a selection of the best of her musings about her prodigious reading habit. Jo Walton s many subjects range from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. Among them, the Zones of Thought novels of Vernor Vinge; the question of what genre readers mean by mainstream ; the under-appreciated SF adventures of C. J. Cherryh; the field s many approaches to time travel; the masterful science fiction of Samuel R. Delany; Salman Rushdie s Midnight s Children; the early Hainish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin; and a Robert A. Heinlein novel you have most certainly never read. Over 130 essays in all, What Makes This Book So Great is an immensely engaging collection of provocative, opinionated thoughts about past and present-day fantasy and science fiction, from one of our best writers.

A family of dragons gathers on the occasion of the death of their father, the elder Bon Agornin. As is custom, they must eat the body. But even as Bon's last remains are polished off, his sons and daughters must all jostle for a position in the new hierarchy. While the youngest son seeks greedy remuneration through the courts of law, the eldest son - a dragon of the cloth - agonises over his father's deathbed confession. While one daughter is caught between loyalty to her family by blood and her family by marriage, another daughter follows her heart - only to discover the great cost of true love... Here is a Victorian story of political intrigue, family ties and political intrigue, set in a world of dragons - a world, quite literally, red in tooth and claw. Full of fiery wit, this is a novel unlike any other.