- Hardcover: 560 pages
- Publisher: UK General Books (Mar 8 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0007289634
- ISBN-13: 978-0007289639
- Product Dimensions: 23.8 x 16.2 x 4 cm
- Shipping Weight: 699 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #277,758 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
Praise for Stephen Hunt: 'Hunt's imagination is probably visible from space. He scatters concepts that other writers would mine for a trilogy like chocolate-bar wrappers. This is Philip Pullman with a dose of benzedrine. Hold on to your hat and let yourself get carried away.' Tom Holt 'A ripping yarn ! the story pounds along ! constant inventiveness keeps the reader hooked ! the finale is a cracking succession of cliffhangers and surprise comebacks. Great fun' SFX 'An inventive, ambitious work, full of wonders and marvels' Lisa Tuttle, The Times 'The characters are convincing and colourful, but the real achievement is the setting, a hellish take on Victorian London ! the depth and complexity of Hunt's vision makes it compulsive reading for all ages' Guardian 'Wonderfully assured ! Hunt knows what his audience like and gives it to them with a sardonic wit and carefully developed tension' Time Out 'All manner of bizarre and fantastical extravagance.' Daily Mail 'Rich and colourful !keeps you engrossed !a confident, audacious novel' SFX 'Like a magpie, Stephen Hunt has plucked colourful events from history and politics and used them for inspiration ! Hunts tells his full-blooded tale with lip-smacking relish, revealing a vivid, often gruesome imagination ! [it] brims with originality and, from the first, its chase-filled plot never lets up' Starburst 'Studded with invention' Independent
Product Description
A tale of high adventure and derring-do set in the same Victorian-style world as the acclaimed The Court of the Air and The Rise of the Iron Moon. The isolated island of Jago is the only place Hannah Conquest has ever known as home. Encircled by the magma ocean of the Fire Sea, it was once the last bastion of freedom when the world struggled under the tyranny of the Chimecan Empire during the age-long winter of the cold-time. But now this once-shining jewel of civilization faces an uncertain future as its inhabitants emigrate to greener climes, leaving the basalt plains and raging steam storms far behind them. For Hannah and her few friends, the streets of the island's last occupied underground city form a vast, near-deserted playground. But Hannah's carefree existence comes to an abrupt halt when her guardian, Archbishop Alice Gray, is brutally murdered in her own cathedral. Someone desperately wants to suppress a secret kept by the archbishop, and if the attempts on Hannah's own life are any indication, the killer believes that Alice passed the knowledge of it onto her ward before her saintly head was separated from her neck. But it soon becomes clear that there is more at stake than the life of one orphan. A deadly power struggle is brewing on Jago, involving rival factions in the senate and the island's most powerful trading partner. And it's beginning to look as if the deaths of Hannah's archaeologist parents shortly after her birth were very far from accidental. Soon the race is on for Hannah and her friends to unravel a chain of hidden riddles and follow them back to their source to save not just her own life, but her island home itself.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hunt's best work to date,
This review is from: Secrets Of The Fire Sea (Hardcover)
Stephen Hunt is one of the best fantasy novelists of his generation, mixing popular adventure with deeper themes with such aplomb that you can't help but wonder why none of his books have walked off with any of the major awards yet.In Secrets of the Fire Sea, the book's central figures include some new characters such as Jethro Daunt, consulting detective, and a young islander, Hannah Conquest, as well as some old favorites such as Commodore Black, privateer, u-boat captain and general all-round rogue. There's great mischief at work on the Isle of Jago, mostly involving the atheist church of the people of the kingdom that has featured indirectly in some of the earlier novels. It's the sly take on religion that puts me in mind of The Name of the Rose, as well as some of the magic realists who write around similar themes. The plot is totally absorbing and the novel deserves all five stars.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Satisfying fantasy thriller,
This review is from: Secrets Of The Fire Sea (Hardcover)
With engaging characters, rich descriptions and a world that puts me in mind of some of the strangeness of China Mieville's novels, Secrets of the Fire Sea delves into the exploits of the Kingdom of Jackals' greatest detective, one Jethro Daunt and his assistant, an artificial intelligence stuck in a very ramshackle robot body.Jethro is taken away from the kingdom, sent by the rational inquisition of the nation's atheist religion to investigate some superstitious goings-on on the island of Jago, which has retained a lot more technology than the other countries of Hunt's fallen far-future Earth, mainly due to an abundance of volcanic-driven electricity. The atmosphere took me straight back to when I first read Umberto Eco's Il nome della rosa (the Name of the Rose, also made into a film with Sean Connery), and is of a similar quality, with the added twist that the setting for this is pure fantasy. Film director's note, this book is crying out to be made into a decent movie! As it is, though, it is a far more than decent book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stephen Hunt brings his worlds to life brilliantly,
This review is from: Secrets Of The Fire Sea (Hardcover)
When it comes to bringing his worlds to life, Stephen Hunt is up there with Frank Herbert and Dune, or Tolkien and Middle Earth, and it's clear he loves packing them full of intrigue and adventure - which is lucky, because that's what I enjoy reading too!Secrets of the Fire Sea is another fine addition to the series which Hunt started with The Court of the Air, and this book shows how far he has come on as a writer since he started out. Every page is layered with twists and he can really make you care about his characters more than any other writer active in the fantasy genre today. The strengths of this book are what Hunt's strengths have always been, thought-provoking concepts and good old fashioned, great dialogue and a plot that is to die for (quite literally, as this novel steers effortlessly into detective fiction territory). As an author, Stephen Hunt reawakened my love for the fantasy novel, which had been bumping along with stilted-quest-after-quest for far too long until he struck the genre.
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