IFWG Publishing Australia is closing in on the final titles to be released in 2020 and it is with great pleasure that we announce the acquisition of Canberra-based author Russell Kirkpatrick’s fantasy novel, Silent Sorrow, the first of his The Book of Remezov series. “Russell has a wonderful record in fantasy literature,” said Gerry Huntman, Managing Director of IFWG, “and his newest manuscript blew our team away for its originality. Kirkpatrick’s work is a great inclusion for our catalogue, and adds a certain fantasy dimension to 2020 that we have long sought for.”

Silent Sorrow’s current blurb reads:

It is a foolish thing to banish the gods who keep the world from falling apart…

Remezov of Sarella is a brilliant and ambitious young geographer who, despite his low birth, is determined to be the greatest scientist in all of quake-prone Medanos. He has arrived in the ancient city of Hanemark to be received into the powerful Guild of Geographers – the youngest inductee in decades. Only then will he finally be rid of his despised heritage.

But Remezov has a secret. He’s found a dead scientist’s diary and hopes to pass off the work as his own. It tells of an imminent invasion of Necronym – malevolent beings with the power to set off world-shaking earthquakes. Superstitious nonsense, of course, except the diary explains strange occurrences that have been puzzling him. Should he surrender it, risking expulsion from the Guild and the loss of everything he’s worked for, all for a crazy warning of an invasion that may never come, or keep it and use it to make his name? It’s a decision he has to make soon, because he’s being hunted by something leaving a trail of mutilated bodies across the city.

Russell Kirkpatrick (born 1961, Christchurch, New Zealand) is a geography lecturer, cartographer and a novelist. He holds a PhD in geography from the University of Canterbury, and lectured at the University of Waikato in Hamilton until 2014. He is currently living and writing in Australia, and moonlights as a sessional lecturer at the University of Canberra. He has worked on seven atlas projects, including the New Zealand Historical Atlas (1998), and authored the Contemporary Atlas of New Zealand (1999/2004). He also wrote and was photographer for a book about New Zealand waterfalls – Walk to Waterfalls (2011).

He has written two fantasy trilogies, Fire of Heaven and Husk. Across the Face of the World was the biggest selling debut fantasy in the United States in 2008. He won the Julius Vogel award in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Silent Sorrow is expected to be published internationally in the second quarter of 2020.