To celebrate publication of Margaret Stohl’s fantastic new book, Icons, we have been running a blog tour this week. Revealing a little bit about each of the characters from the book, we are thrilled to finish off the week with THE LOVER!

Visit the rest of the stops on the book tour and get to know the other icons below:

• The Rager – hosted by Totally Bookalicious
• The Freak – hosted by Bookish Treasures
• The Weeper – hosted by Fiction Fascination

To finish off the tour, we are running a little competition to win six fantastic YA novels, including Icons, Meg Cabot’s Insatiable, Lauren deStefano’s Wither, Megan Shepherd’s Madman’s Daughter, Janet Edwards’ Earth Girl and Abigail Gibbs’ The Dark Heroine: Dinner with a Vampire.

To enter, just leave a comment telling us what makes a great heroine and we’ll choose one winner at random.

All entries must be in by midnight on 23rd May 2013 and this competition is open to UK entrants only.

Watch the trailer for Icons below and pick it up on Amazon or at your local bookshop.

We have now reviewed all the submissions in our inbox and responded to 3595 submissions that were not right for our list. The remaining 948 are marked for further reading and consideration.

We are continuing to review the remaining entries as quickly as we can, and will  update you again in a few weeks. As before, if you have a question as to your status or would like to pull your submission, please email us at voyagersubmissions(at)harpercollins.com.

THE FINAL BOOK IS NOW AVAILABLE! The end is, indeed, finally here.

We know you are devouring your ebook, or waiting with bated breath as soon as you get your print copy. In a spare moment, do check out some of the media that Raymond E. Feist has been doing. He spills on what’s next and what the end of the Chaoswar Saga means! Here’s an excerpt from a recent Q&A on TheExaminer.com:

Given the current world climate, how do you feel that fantasy/magic can empower readers? What are some of the lessons that you hope readers may carry from your fiction into their everyday lives?

Any good story call galvanize a person, make him/her thing about things a different way, reassess their own motives and needs, but that’s never my intent. That’s an unintended consequence of me just trying to entertain, to write what we used to call “ripping yarns.” If someone gains a personal insight into something important that’s fine, but that was never my intent.

After endings come new beginnings. So…what can readers expect next?

Next? More fantasy, in a new world with new rules. The series is The War of Five Crowns and the first book is King of Ashes. Then a more contemporary fantasy, here on Earth, called Elder Gods. After that, the possibilities are endless.

The San Diego Union Tribune also did a large feature on Feist and his legacy:

In 1971, at the age of 26, he returned to school. Living in East County with his mother, Barbara Feist, he completed a year at Grossmont College, then transferred to UC San Diego. One day on campus, the communications major saw several students playing a game with polyhedron dice. He stopped, and his destiny was sealed.

Ray joined this group’s regular sessions of “Dungeons & Dragons,” an intricate role-playing game. His new friends had created a planet for their adventures: Midkemia. They also introduced aliens that invaded Midkemia, infiltrating via a tear in the fabric of space and time, the Rift — elements that would become the backdrop to Feist’s 29-book cycle.

(more here)

Are you sad the trilogy has ended? Let us know your thoughts! 

In Southern California? Feist’s doing a big blowout event for the end of the series at Mysterious Galaxy  on May 17th and you are invited! Be sure to come in costume!

Raymond is still here for a few more days, so if you would like to meet him and get your book signed, the full list of events can be found here.

Forbidden Planet also have a limited amount of signed stock, so if you want to get a signed copy but aren’t able to get to a signing, you can get one here.

Bottom five photos copyright John Bunting

Lois McMaster Bujold is one of the most highly awarded science fiction/fantasy writers in the world. The Authors Road  recently stopped by her house for a chat!

Watch it here!

In a gritty urban fantasy world where elves, faeries, trolls, werewolves, and vampires swim free in a sea of humanity, sometimes you need an edge. Looking for a little love? Need some luck? Desperate for revenge? Gage can give you what you need. The most talented tattoo artist in town (and a wizard in hiding), he knows the right symbol and the right mix of ingredients and ink to achieve your heart’s desire. One tattoo is all it takes. But remember, everything has its price.

The wizards know Gage is using forbidden magic, and they intend to punish him for his  transgressions. Too bad if entire cities get in the way. They will stop at nothing to quell a nascent magical uprising and Gage will be the sacrifice they need…. if they can find him.

In Michigan? Jocelynn will be signing Thursday night (5/9) at 7:00pm:

Schuler’s Books and Music

1982 Grand River Ave Okemos, MI 48864

Praise for the Asylum Tales:

“Gritty, authentic and fast-paced! This urban fantasy series rocks!” — J.R. Ward

“A lot of fun, with a whole new take on the dark urban fantasy. Bright and breezy, with fascinating characters, and a background with hidden depths. Drake puts the ink in incredible.” — Simon R. Green

“An other-earthly blend of magic and technology in the best tradition of urban fantasy that refused to let me go. The continuing Asylum Tales promise to be intriguing and wildly inventive.” — Kim Harrison

“Jocelynn is amazing at fleshing out plots, subplots and characters.” — USA Today

“Expert storyteller Drake invites readers to join her in a spirited and spellbinding new series…. The author does a great job of introducing her mesmerizing new world and then filling it with a truly compelling cast of characters. She is on track to deliver another outstanding and inventive series.” — Romantic Times BOOKclub

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she’d claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

Kill City Blues by Richard Kadrey

James Stark, aka Sandman Slim, has managed to get out of Hell, renounce his title as the new Lucifer, and settle back into life in LA. But he also lost the Qomrama Om Ya, an all-powerful weapon from the banished older gods. Older gods who are returning, and searching for their lost power.

The hunt leads Stark to an abandoned shopping mall-a global shopping paradise-infested with Lurkers and wretched bottom-feeding Sub Rosa families, squatters who have formed tight tribes to guard their tiny patches of retail wasteland. Somewhere in this kill zone is a dead man with the answers Stark needs. All Stark has to do is find the dead man, recover the artifact, and outwit and outrun the angry old gods-and natural-born killers-on his tail. But not even Sandman Slim is infallible, and any mistakes will cost him dearly.

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

Victoria McQueen has a secret gift for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. On her Raleigh Tuff Burner bike, she makes her way to a rickety covered bridge that, within moments, takes her wherever she needs to go, whether it’s across Massachusetts or across the country.

Charles Talent Manx has a way with children. He likes to take them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the NOS4A2 vanity plate. With his old car, he can slip right out of the everyday world, and onto the hidden roads that transport them to an astonishing – and terrifying – playground of amusements he calls “Christmasland.”

Then, one day, Vic goes looking for trouble—and finds Manx. That was a lifetime ago. Now Vic, the only kid to ever escape Manx’s unmitigated evil, is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx never stopped thinking about Victoria McQueen. He’s on the road again and he’s picked up a new passenger: Vic’s own son.

The Long War by Sir Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

The Long War by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter follows the adventures and travails of heroes Joshua Valiente and Lobsang in an exciting continuation of the extraordinary science fiction journey begun in their New York Times bestseller The Long Earth.

A generation after the events of The Long Earth, humankind has spread across the new worlds opened up by “stepping.” A new “America”—Valhalla—is emerging more than a million steps from Datum—our Earth. Thanks to a bountiful environment, the Valhallan society mirrors the core values and behaviors of colonial America. And Valhalla is growing restless under the controlling long arm of the Datum government.

Soon Joshua, now a married man, is summoned by Lobsang to deal with a building crisis that threatens to plunge the Long Earth into a war unlike any humankind has waged before.

It is, quite literally, the end of an era. Raymond E. Feist’s thrilling epic fantasy opener – MAGICIAN – introduced to us the engaging character of Pug, who starts life as an orphaned kitchen-boy only to be apprenticed to a magician, captured as a slave and taken as a prisoner through a rift between worlds, ending up as a fully-fledged magician himself.

That was 31 years and 29 bestselling books ago: even before I started work as a publisher. I was already well aware of the phenomenon that MAGICIAN had been before I joined HarperCollins in 1991. Coming from a small independent publisher (George Allen & Unwin) I wasn’t used to sales in the hundreds of thousands (except, of course for the Master himself, JRR Tolkien). Working on the sf and fantasy list at HarperCollins was quite daunting: for alongside Ray Feist there also sat Stephen Donaldson, David Eddings, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, all titans of the genre.

I have to admit to being quite scared at the prospect of meeting Ray for the first time, at the WorldCon in San Francisco in 1993. Everyone had told me tales about this leviathan of an author. He was a global megastar, selling millions of copies worldwide. He was used to a certain level of pampering from his publishers; he liked a good steak and was a connoisseur of fine red wine, my bosses told me, packing me off to meet him. Nervously, I asked the convention hotel to recommend a good steakhouse. They conferred: not easy apparently, since we were in the business district and all the restaurants were shut for the Labour Day weekend. They gave me a contact number and I booked a table, confident all would go swimmingly. I met Ray at the restaurant. Well, I say restaurant. More of a burger joint, actually. It did have tables… but that was about the height of its sophistication. It was, shall we say, no River House. I asked for a wine list. They laughed in my face. The food was terrible. I wanted to die. But Ray was a total gentleman throughout the entire excruciating experience, determined to put me at my ease, and from that day to this we have gone from strength to strength as author and publisher. And we’ve more than made up for that lapse in San Francisco with some mighty fine meals and wine in the intervening years.

But now we really have something huge to celebrate when Ray visits the UK this month. For MAGICIAN’S END – the 30th book in the Riftwar Cycle – marks the epic conclusion to this phenomenal series. And a truly worthy final volume it is, too.

When he delivered the huge manuscript last year I stayed up till 1am to finish reading it, with tears running down my face. Through the past three decades I have watched the ebb and flow of gods and dark elves, of kings and queens, knights and squires; spies and swordsmen, dragons and the Dread. War, love, magic, heroism, treachery and rifts between worlds: it’s made for a gloriously epic combination all these years.

MAGICIAN’S END brings together all the characters fantasy fans have loved all their adult lives, and which new readers are discovering with a sense of awe and delight every day, and delivers a truly cataclysmic, yet inspiring, ending for them. As a reader and a fan, I feel bereft: but as a publisher…. What a marvellous event it is going to be for us all, publishing this extraordinary final volume. I do hope you will turn out and help us to make the occasion a really special time and help us to celebrate in style with our brilliant and charming author.

Jane Johnson, HarperVoyager UK Publishing Director

Magician’s End is published on 6th May 2013 in the UK. Pre-order it now in hardback or in eBook.

Humanity had appeared to fend off the Sh’daar assault once and for all, though they never learned why the alien empire was driven to halt Earth’s advancement toward technological Singularity.

But in this war of worlds, victory is always elusive. And now a new battle begins.

After twenty years of peace, not one but two fragile truces are unraveling. Alexander Koenig, the former Navy commander whose heroics forced the Sh’daar into submission, has won a second term as President of the United States of North America. But pursuing his mandate—sovereignty from the centuries-old Earth Confederation—becomes a risky proposition due to events taking place on the other side of the galaxy. A Confederation research vessel has been ambushed. Destroyers are descending on a human colony. It seems the Sh’daar have betrayed their treaty, and all nations must stand united—or face certain death.

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