Finbar J. Shirley, fantasy author of The Keep and Ultimum

Prismatic · Book 1

The Keep

The enemy branded him Prince-Slayer. The Wizard's Keep wants him anyway.

Roald is a farmer's son from the village of Drellum. His warrior clan secretly trained him with a blade, and his mother taught him a forbidden healing cantrip. A prophecy hangs over him that no one will explain.

When the kingdom of Westphalia demands more soldiers for the eastern front, Roald and his best friend Joel march off to war, certain the bards will sing of them.

At the Battle of Phalia there is no glory. The King of Westphalia falls. Joel falls. And Roald cuts down the knight responsible, who turns out to be an enemy prince.

Captured, chained and pelted through the streets of the conquering kingdom, Roald spends two winters in Ravenskeep, a prison carved into a mountain, where the torturer collects his fee in fingernails.

On the morning he is due to hang, someone buys his life.

The price is an iron collar that only the Wizard's Keep can remove, and an order to reach the Keep before the spring equinox. Roald doesn't know who sent for him. He barely knows a single spell. And the gold meant for his journey has gone into the torturer's pocket.

Branded, half-starved and penniless, he sets out for Yarispolia, the free city that guards the pass to the Keep. With him is Laura, a one-armed spear-maiden from his old squad. Meanwhile, Daniella Dar Cordum, youngest daughter of the High Wizard King of Vitria, has been packed off to the very same Keep by sisters who want her out of the way.

The Keep is the fast-paced first instalment of the Prismatic series: epic military fantasy of war, survival, found family, and a school of magic where a farmhand has no business being.

For fans of Anthony Ryan and John Gwynne.

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Ultimum · Book 1 · Coming soon

Ultimum

One drop changed everything.

He was meant to be somebody. Instead, he's bleeding out at the bottom of a pit beneath London.

Joe Peters had it all once: a chemistry scholarship to Oxford, a girl he loved, and a geologist father who always phoned home from the dig. Then his father died in an "accident" at a remote Red Rock site. His mother broke. A car crash took his arm and half his mind, and the streets took the rest.

Now he should be dead. Instead he wakes in the dark, healed. His arm works. His head is clear for the first time in years. And in his gut burns a flame left to him by Augustus Levi, a pillsmith who died two thousand years ago and has a lot to say about his new disciple.

With his blunt big brother Darius and Mary McQuairn, a hard-smoking Irish journalist who has spent years digging into Red Rock, Joe goes after the truth about his father's death. The trail leads down sealed mineshafts, up 144 steps that no one has climbed in millennia, and into a hidden Britain of Roman ruins, secret gardeners and trials where losing means dying.

Red Rock is bigger than one company, though. And the people who buried his father are already watching.

Ultimum is the first book in a British cultivation fantasy series: an underdog's rise, ancient masters, pill furnaces and the magic buried under modern London.

Hear when it launches

About the author

Finbar J. Shirley writes fast-paced fantasy from Charlo, New Brunswick, where his desk looks out over the Bay of Chaleur. Brandon Sanderson is his favourite author, and he grew up on Dickens, Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth and Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind. He started writing during his first year in prison, when he ran out of great series to read, and that first draft taught him the craft. The Keep begins his epic Prismatic series, and Ultimum, a British cultivation fantasy, launches his second. A trained electrician and lifelong lover of space, he hopes one day to write the kind of sprawling science fiction he grew up admiring.

The Keep

Ultimum

About the author

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