Waiting on Wednesday #8 - The City of Brass

This week's Waiting on Wednesday is possibly my longest wait for a book - with The City of Brass by S A Chakraborty not due out until November. My last to WoWs have been due out in June/July and I practically threw myself to the floor in suitably dramatic fashion when I found that out, so add on four months and there was some colourful language when I checked the Goodreads publication date!

I discovered this book on one of my frequent trips to the io9 website for a fix of movie/tv/comic book spoilers, and happened to come across a promo post with a quote from the author and the first chapter where I was introduced to Nahri, the trickster/healer protagonist, as she's conning a couple of rich guys out of their money with a combination of her wits and playing up to their preconceptions of her.

Well, this superstitious fool is about to swindle you for all you’re worth, so insult away.
Nahri smiled as the men approached.

I can't get into quoting too many of the awesome bits because I'll end up copying and pasting the whole damn thing. The promo post and first chapter are over on io9 if you want to check them out. Be warned though, you'll be as hooked as I was, and it's a long wait for the rest of the book!

The world building sounds epic too! As the author herself puts it: "In the book, there’s a djinn version of Baghdad’s great library, filled with the ancient books humans have lost alongside powerful texts of magic; they battle with weapons from Achaemenid Persia (enhanced by fire of course); the medical traditions of famed scholars like Ibn Sina have been adapted to treat magical maladies; dancers conjure flowers while singing Mughal love songs; a court system based on the Zanzibar Sultanate deals justice to merchants who bewitch their competitors… not to mention a cityscape featuring everything from ziggurats and pyramids to minarets and stupas. I also pushed a little further with the idea of the unseen, imagining a world of enchanted creatures created from other elements passing through ours: marid raising rivers into great serpents, peris whipping the air into tornados, djinn conjuring maps of smoke and racing birds of fire."

The whole thing has echoes of Laini Taylor's incredible Daughter of Smoke and Bone series (and her Strange the Dreamer duology - which I've just started and am loving!) and Renee Ahdieh's middle eastern inspired world from The Wrath and the Dawn. And the icing on the cake - the cover art is bloody gorgeous too!

Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of 18th century Cairo, she’s a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trade she uses to get by—palm readings, zars, healings—are all tricks, sleights of hand, learned skills; a means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles.

But when Nahri accidentally summons an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior to her side during one of her cons, she’s forced to accept that the magical world she thought only existed in childhood stories is real. For the warrior tells her a new tale: across hot, windswept sands teeming with creatures of fire, and rivers where the mythical marid sleep; past ruins of once-magnificent human metropolises, and mountains where the circling hawks are not what they seem, lies Daevabad, the legendary city of brass; a city to which Nahri is irrevocably bound.

In that city, behind gilded brass walls laced with enchantments, behind the six gates of the six djinn tribes, old resentments are simmering. And when Nahri decides to enter this world, she learns that true power is fierce and brutal. That magic cannot shield her from the dangerous web of court politics. That even the cleverest of schemes can have deadly consequences. After all, there is a reason they say be careful what you wish for . . .

So, while I count down the six months I have to wait for this book, what's your Waiting on Wednesday?