Foul Tide's Turning
The truth ignites civil war at home and invasion from abroad — two brothers forced back into history's jaws.
About this book
Civil war in the Kingdom of Weyland; the wind-pilots of Rodal forced to choose a side; the Vandian Imperium in slow motion behind the curtain; and a new courtier whose menace is that he is unfailingly reasonable. If Book One was a long journey, Foul Tide's Turning is a long argument — the series' civil-war-and-intrigue volume.
The Kingdom of Weyland — on a slow constitutional drift toward the modern age — is now in the wrong hands at the wrong moment, with a king who has decided that an old privilege is worth a war to recover. Loyalists, royalists, regional aristocrats, the rail-and-radio guilds and the privateers of the air all pick sides on logic that does not entirely add up.
It opens the world wide. The wind-pilot republic of Rodal, built into vertical cliffs, cannot stay out. The Lancean League is forced to test its convictions. The Nijumeti horde on the great eastern steppes is gathering for its own reasons. New POV threads open in courts and on steppes that Book One could only point at.
And in the imperial palace of Vandia, a courtier named Apolleon — whose first appearance in any room is unfailingly polite — has begun to advise the wrong people. The action is sustained, the politics unsentimental, and the cosmic background of the series first begins to make itself felt as a factor rather than a rumour.
Foul Tide's Turning widens the canvas. The first book introduced the world; the second turns it into a war and draws the political map the series will use for the rest of its arc. If a reader was on the fence after Book One — wanting more political weight, more cultural variety, higher stakes — this is the book they were waiting for.
- you want the political-intrigue dimension of a series turned all the way up;
- you like a villain who unsettles by being reasonable;
- you want a war that is morally complex on every side;
- you're happy for a Book Two to open, deepen and escalate rather than try to be a finale.