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In this first novel set in award-winning author Marie Brennan's incomparable Driftwood fantasy universe, enter a post-apocalyptic realm where the apocalypse has not ended, where fragments of worlds cohere into shifting myths. Yet even as everything fades, Drifters gather to tell conflicting legends of Last, the guide - the one man who seemed immortal, but may have been a fraud.
Who is Last?
Fame is rare in Driftwood―it's hard to get famous if you don't stick around long enough for people to know you. But many know the guide, Last, a one-blooded survivor who has seen his world end many lifetimes ago. For Driftwood is a strange place of slow apocalypses, where continents eventually crumble into mere neighborhoods, pulled inexorably towards the center in the Crush. Cultures clash, countries fall, and everything eventually disintegrates.
Within the Shreds, a rumor goes around that Last has died. Drifters come together to commemorate him. But who really was Last? Lying liar, or heroic savior? A mercenary, a charlatan, a legend? A man, an immortal―perhaps even a god?
About Driftwood
Driftwood is the invention of bestselling author Marie Brennan. Mirroring the world that many people are currently living in, the Driftwood stories chronicle the struggles of survivors and outcasts to keep their worlds alive until everything changes, diminishes, and is destroyed. Driftwood is the first full-length novel in this world.
"Brennan skillfully builds a multiplicity of worlds, painting each unique and fully developed culture with bold, minimalist strokes...rendering each member of the sprawling cast with impressive nuance and subtlety. Exploring found family, adaptation, and hope in the face of apocalypse, Brennan imbues this high-concept fantasy with a strong emotional core. Fantasy fans will be thrilled." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Readers will close the cover aching to read more about Last and his world. An exciting delve into a conglomerate land filled with magic and mystery." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Brennan's series of vignettes is complex and riveting, populated by distinct worlds, each with its own rules....Driftwood is epic in scale and yet rooted in satisfying detail, full of possibility and wonder." - Booklist (starred review)
"Driftwood is a richly imagined and shifting place. I keep thinking about it weeks after shutting the book. This is what people mean by 'haunting.'" - Mary Robinette Kowal, author of The Calculating Stars
"Bittersweet and haunting, Brennan's story celebrates the death-defying power of love and everlasting memory." - Karen Lord, author of Redemption in Indigo
"Haunting, timeless, and timely. Brennan invented Driftwood, but it feels like she discovered it." - Max Gladstone author of The Empress of Forever
This information about Driftwood was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for material. She recently misapplied her professors' hard work to Turning Darkness Into Light, a sequel to the Hugo Award-nominated Victorian adventure series The Memoirs of Lady Trent. She is the author of the Doppelganger duology of Warrior and Witch, the urban fantasies Lies and Prophecy and Chains and Memory, the Onyx Court historical fantasy series, the Varekai novellas, and nearly sixty short stories, as well as the New Worlds series of worldbuilding guides.
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