A Heroka story
Aurora Award Finalist story from a multi-award winning author.
Lilith Hoyl awakes to find herself a prisoner in a top-secret government laboratory. To win her freedom, all she needs to do...is prove that she's human. If you enjoy shape-shifter and conspiracy stories, you'll enjoy this tale.
“It's a very interesting turn-around story, in which our expectations are upended at the last minute. ...a good read, and sadly, far too relevant to our own present world.” —The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf
“...great fun to read” —Dreams and Speculations
“...has a woman fed chemicals to prove whether she’s human or a shape-shifter ... well worth reading.” —SF Crowsnest Reviews Views: 26
AURORA AWARD WINNER
A Heroka story
The Heroka are an ancient race of shape shifters, drawing vitality from their animal totems. Gwyn Blaidd, a Heroka of the wolf totem, has been a recluse ever since a deadly battle with the Tainchel, the covert government agency that hunts his kind—a battle that cost him the woman he loved. But to save an old friend, Gwyn must again face the Tainchel—and his own dark past.
“A vivid and wonderfully written tale about Native Canadian spirits, in the vein of Thomas King.”
—Challenging Destiny
“Draws on North American Indian myths, particularly the idea of shapeshifters... Smith once more creates a credible and sympathetic protagonist, Gwyn Blaidd, [who] returns to his old stomping ground to help out some fellow shapeshifters who have become embroiled in a conflict with a large logging concern.” —The Fix Views: 12
Epic in scope, precise in detail, and heart-breaking in its human drama, Former People is the first book to recount the history of the aristocracy caught up in the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin’s Russia. Filled with chilling tales of looted palaces and burning estates, of desperate flights in the night from marauding peasants and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution, it is the story of how a centuries’-old elite, famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the Tsar and Empire, and its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia.Yet Former People is also a story of survival and accommodation, of how many of the tsarist ruling class—so-called “former people” and “class enemies”—overcame the psychological wounds inflicted by the loss of their world and decades of repression as they struggled to find a place for themselves and their families in the new, hostile order of the Soviet Union. Chronicling the fate of two great aristocratic families—the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns—it reveals how even in the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on. Told with sensitivity and nuance by acclaimed historian Douglas Smith, Former People is the dramatic portrait of two of Russia’s most powerful aristocratic families, and a sweeping account of their homeland in violent transition. Views: 10
