First Anthology I recall reading in a very long time! I was absolutely captivated by the cover, and the author list was crazy strong, so I decided to get the audiobook.

The narration was absolutely outstanding. I was worried the voices would be similar across the stories and I’d get characters confused, but that wasn’t a worry at all. The narrator had a brilliant, varied collection of voices, tones, and characters, and kept every story very unique and clear.

As is to be expected in a collection of stories, there are those I prefer more than others, and I did end up skipping several of them (usually because I found my mind wandering too much/just wasn’t super hooked by them - which is something I’m trying to apply to my reading more and more often these days).

There were a few stand-out stories for me:

- The King-Killing Queen - Shawn Speakman
- Hand Of The Artist - Trudi Canavan
- The Blade Queen And The Stone Heart - Anna Stephens (Holy fucking shit that was weird. Horrific and epic in equal measure!)
- On Wings Of Song - Deborah A. Wolf
- The Face Of The King - Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tchaikovsky is defo my new favourite author!)
- Mother Death - Michael R. Fletcher


Overall a nice palette cleanser read, with several short concepts and ideas explored in between chunkier novels. Very glad to have picked it up!

Definitely want to check out some of these authors’ other writing!