What are we waiting on this week? Nathan is waiting on The Hexologists!
Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine where readers and bloggers share and discuss books they are excited about reading and which have generally not yet been released.
Orbit Books just released the cover of Josiah Bancroft’s newest book The Hexologists (due to be published on September 26, 2023) and it is absolute FIRE. I was already eagerly awaiting this book, and now I am impatiently waiting (but let’s be honest, I do absolutely everything impatiently).
Just take a look:
I make it no secret that Josiah Bancroft’s first series, The Books of Babel (starting with Senlin Ascends) is one of my all-time favorite series. I probably have it ranked #4 on my favorites list; it is the perfect combination of a steampunk aesthetic, creative worldbuilding, endearing characters, and the encapsulation of found family. It is not only one of the strangest series I have ever read, but also one of the funniest, daring, and heartwarming.
So how couldn’t I be absolutely excited when Bancroft is coming out with a new book? On top of that, it sounds even more quirky and creative than his Babel books. Take a look at the official blurb:
The first book in a wildly entertaining new fantasy series from acclaimed author Josiah Bancroft where a married couple team up to solve magical, and often quite odd, mysteries.
The Hexologists, Iz and Warren Wilby, are quite accustomed to helping desperate clients with the bugbears of city life. Aided by hexes and a bag of charmed relics, the Wilbies have recovered children abducted by chimney-wraiths, removed infestations of barb-nosed incubi, and ventured into the Gray Plains of the Unmade to soothe a troubled ghost. Well-acquainted with the weird, they never shy away from a challenging case.
But when they are approached by the royal secretary and told the king pleads to be baked into a cake–going so far as to wedge himself inside a lit oven–the Wilbies soon find themselves embroiled in a mystery that could very well see the nation turned on its head. Their effort to expose a royal secret buried under forty years of lies brings them nose to nose with a violent antiroyalist gang, avaricious ghouls, alchemists who draw their power from a hell-like dimension, and a bookish dragon who only occasionally eats people.
Armed with a love toughened by adversity and a stick of chalk that can conjure light from the darkness, hope from the hopeless, Iz and Warren Wilby are ready for whatever springs from the alleys, graves, and shadows next.
The Hexologists is now available for preorder, and autumn is right around the corner!
