Are you ready to go back… to the Expanse?
Do you remember the colorless city called House Abascar?
Do you recall the mischievous artist who emerged from the woods, revealing colors no one had ever seen before?
Did you glimpse that shadowy behemoth that lives beneath the surface of Deep Lake?
Did you come to care about Krawg and Warney, the thieves who found a baby on the riverbank?
Perhaps you haven’t experienced these things yet.
This summer, Amazon is offering you Auralia’s Colors — both the paperback edition and the Kindle edition — for less than $5.
That’s the price of a Starbucks drink.
This novel’s been around a while, passed from reader to reader like a secret. And one of the great joys for me has been watching what happens when it inspires visual artists like Kristine Macasieb and Karen Renee (whose interpretations you see here in this post).
Pick up a copy of Auralia’s Colors for yourself, your spouse, your kids, or your fantasy-loving friend.
And make sure they know that there are three more books in the series, if they want to travel farther.
If they need to be persuaded, well… I’m biased, so don’t listen to me. You can read what readers, writers, and reviewers have said instead…
“Film critic and author Overstreet (Through a Screen Darkly) offers a powerful myth for his first foray into fiction. The kingdom of Abascar is cloaked in gloom, sentenced to an ongoing “wintering” by a jealous queen, in which colors have been done away with and are only allowed in the royal court. But young Auralia, found as a baby by the river and raised by outcasts, has a talent for finding colors everywhere and bringing them to life in a way no one has ever seen before. The fate of the kingdom rests on what Auralia chooses to do and how the king responds. Overstreet creates a world with not only its own geography but its own vocabulary — it is haunted by beastmen, home to cloudgrasper trees, vawns (something like dinosaurs) and twister fish. … Overstreet’s writing is precise and beautiful, and the story is masterfully told. Readers will be hungry for the next installment.”
–Publishers Weekly (Review, 7/16)
“Through word, image, and color Jeffrey Overstreet has crafted a work of art. From first to final page this original fantasy is sure to draw readers in. Auralia’s Colorssparkles.”
–Janet Lee Carey, award-winning author of The Beast of Noor and Dragon’s Keep
“Jeffrey Overstreet’s first fantasy, Auralia’s Colors, and its heroine’s cloak of wonders take their power from a vision of art that is auroral, looking to the return of beauty, and that intends to restore spirit and and mystery to the world. The book achieves its ends by the creation of a rich, complex universe and a series of dramatic, explosive events.”
–Marly Youmans, author of Ingledove and The Curse of the Raven Mocker
“In Auralia’s Colors, Overstreet masterfully extends the borders of imagination. Whereas so many writers sacrifice characterization for plot or substitute weirdness for substance, Overstreet does neither. His characters are richly crafted but still recognizably human, and therefore, inhabitable. This story is wild and intricate tale, a high-octane full-throttle fantasy. Fasten your seat belts.”
–Gina Ochsner, author of The Necessary Grace to Fall and People I Wanted to Be
“The late John Gardner said that a good story should unfold like a vivid and continuous dream. With Auralia’s Colors, Jeffrey Overstreet has crafted just such a story, one that will leave readers ready to dream with him again.”
–John Wilson, Editor, Books & Culture
“Jeffrey Overstreet weaves myth and reality, hope and loss into his tapestry, and he ties off The Red Strand with a cataclysmic flourish.”
–Kathy Tyers, author of the Firebird trilogy and Shivering World
“Welcome to the land of the fangbear, the muckmoth, and the Midnight Swindler. To a story brimming with lovely literary rewards and a cast of characters by turn loathsome and hilarious, winsome and mysterious. It’s not often one gets to be present at the birth of a classic, but Auralia’s Colors is that kind of storytelling. A true delight on so many levels.”
–Clint Kelly, author of the Sensations Series: Scent, Echo, and Delicacy
“In this new fantasy novel Auralia’s Colors, Jeff Overstreet weaves together a wide cast of compelling characters and an intriguing story in the setting of a world both imaginative and arresting–a world phantastic in both old and new meanings of that word. Readers will care what happens both to the characters of the tale (all of them) as well as to the realm of Abascar itself, and will not want to put this book down.”
–Matthew Dickerson, co-author of From Homer to Harry Potter: a Handbook of Myth and Fantasy and Ents, Elves, and Eriador: the Environmental Vision of J.R.R.Tolkien
“… the trick with excellent fantasy is to build a world that is more than the context for beloved characters. The world itself is a subtle character and parallels in important ways our experience; it is full of political and cultural commentary. The society is thick. Balancing this thickness without prostituting characters to score pet cultural points is not easy. Few authors manage it. The too-common tragedy in contemporary fantasy involves a thick political subtext which turns more on the author’s partisan axe-grind than on letting good characters find their own battles. It’s knife’s-edge work to create masterful tales that take not only great skill, but quiet conviction.
This is what makes Jeffrey Overstreet great, and that is why his work is paralleled in review after review with the greats of the fantasy world.
What makes Overstreet’s writing fresh is that each novel grapples with the piece of a larger cultural question…. The narrative coherence is probably the singular brilliance, as we encounter time and again in his characters deeply problematic questions that stay with us long after the novel is done, its plot resolved, and its characters finished for the day.”
– Robert Joustra, Comment
“Overstreet’s use of language is beautiful and lyrical, reminiscent of Patricia McKillip’s elegant prose. … Overstreet gives us a story that we want to see to its end, but that we also do not want ever to end.”
– Matthew Winslow, Greenman Review