About the Book
From World Fantasy Award-winner and New York Times bestselling author Tobias Buckell comes a tale of family bonds, royal power, and the truth that threatens it all.
“You shall not suffer a librarian to live.”
Growing up in Ninetha, Lilith has known this law all her life. The city’s every need is provided for by a god-machine called the cornucopia, which can produce food, clothing, anything in response to a thought. The gods provided this bounty on one condition: that humanity give up reading and writing.
Then, a librarian, an actual seeker of forbidden written knowledge, walks through the gates of the citadel, his very presence unraveling the life Lilith has known. She learns her father, the Lord Musketeer himself, has been harboring a secret – one that turns Ninetha against Lilith’s family.
Forced to flee, forced to throw in her lot with the librarian, Lilith uncovers even greater secrets – about the lie her life has been, and about the very nature of their world.
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Praise for “The Tangled Lands”
“Buckell masterfully crafts this coming-of-age story for a strong, compassionate heroine who needed a bit of reality thrust upon her.” –Booklist, STARRED Review
“The message about the importance of literacy could not be more timely, and Buckell’s sure-handed plotting keep the pages flying. Readers will be hooked.” –Publishers Weekly
“In World Fantasy Award winner Buckell’s (The Trove) latest, Lilith undergoes a journey from innocence to terrible experience. Recommended for readers who enjoy stories that reveal in layers and any who liked the postapocalyptic, flawed reconstruction of knowledge in The Starless Crown by James Rollins.” –Library Journal
“Buckell has been writing speculative fiction for thirty years and his experience shows in this book. His ability to lean on but subvert common tropes enables him to deliver an adventure of discovery that is both somehow familiar but also often disorienting as the penny drops. […] both exciting and thought provoking for anyone who like great speculative fiction.” Pile by the Bed
“Buckell crafts a fascinating and passionate story of exploration—internal and external—across a strange world living in the wreckage of a mysterious past, a story that has at its center a belief in the power, even the human necessity, of reading. Ancillary Review of Books.” Ancillary Review of Books
“A Stranger in the Citadel thus emerges as a well-told and at times provocative addition to the long SF tradition of tales of postrationalist dystopias who blame scientists and intellectuals for their plight (a tradition that includes such classics as Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow)” –Locus Magazine