Dark Breakers

World Fantasy Award finalist for Best Story CollectionLocus Award finalist for Best Story Collection "Welcome to a Gilded Era like you've never before known and will never be able to forget . If Titania herself were to commission a book, it would be this one."-Fran Wilde, two-time Nebula Award-winning author of Updraft and Riverland"Cooney's lush follow-up to Desdemona and the Deep offers five stories linked by an intricate shared world .
Throughout, Cooney's descriptions are extravagant and gorgeous, and the musical cadence of her prose makes it exceptionally easy to be drawn into the worlds she weaves . Romantic fantasy readers will find a lot to love."-Publishers WeeklyA young human painter and an ageless gentry queen fall in love over spilled wine-at the risk of his life and her immortality. Pulled into the Veil Between Worlds, two feuding neighbors (and a living statue) get swept up in a brutal war of succession.
An investigative reporter infiltrates the Seafall City Laundries to write the exposé of a lifetime, and uncovers secrets she never believed possible. Returning to an oak grove to scatter her husband's ashes, an elderly widow meets an otherworldly friend, who offers her a momentous choice. Two gentry queens of the Valwode plot to hijack a human rocketship and steal the moon out of the sky. Dark Breakers gathers three new and two previously uncollected tales from World Fantasy Award-winning writer C.
S. E. Cooney that expand on the thrice-enfolded worlds first introduced in her Locus and World Fantasy award-nominated novella Desdemona and the Deep. In her introduction to Dark Breakers, Crawford Award-winning author Sharon Shinn advises those who pick up this book to "settle in for a fantastical read" full of "vivid world-building, with layer upon layer of detail; prose so dense and gorgeous you can scoop up the words like handfuls of jewels; a mischievous sense of humor; and a warm and hopeful heart.""C.
S. E. Cooney's prose is like a cake baked by the fairies-beautifully layered, rich and precise, so delicious that it should be devoured with a silver fork."-Theodora Goss, World Fantasy and Mythopoeic Award-winning author of The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series"Dark Breakers is compounded of voluptuous invention and ferocious structural loves-for new romances and old friends, for the works of hands, for mortality and its gifts, and all the possibilities of worlds bleeding, weeping, wandering into each other's arms."-Kathleen Jennings, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Flyaway"Few people create worlds as lavish and sensual as those that spring from Cooney's effervescent imagination .