Dragonfall

"This one’s quite different to the other books. I wanted to include something that approaches dragons and dragon riders in a different way – this one’s perhaps less ‘dragon rider’ and more just ‘dragon.’ It’s set in a world where dragons, once betrayed by humans, have been banished to a dark, dying world. As centuries passed, humans forgot that they’d done this, and they start to worship dragons as gods, completely unaware that the dragons they’re worshiping are trapped in another realm. The dragons seek revenge on the humans that banished them. The story begins with Everen, who’s the last male dragon. He’s forcibly brought to the human world after a heist goes wrong. The human protagonist, Arcady, is an orphaned, gender-fluid thief who inadvertently triggers Everen’s arrival in human form when a heist for a valued artefact goes awry. So for much of the book, one of the main characters is a dragon in human form. For Everen the dragon, their bond is crucial for the survival of his race. As part of the magic of this world, his task is to convince a human to bond with him completely – body, mind and soul – and then kill them to release his kind. And then they start to have a potentially romantic interaction – and it’s all about his dilemma: humans are evil and terrible and they banished us, and now I have to trick one into bonding with me and kill them to free my people, but then I learn that actually humans aren’t so bad and they don’t have a clue that this has happened in their past… A really interesting book, well worth reading. It’s a queer-normative world, with its own constructed language that Lam spent a great deal of time working on with a doctor of linguistics. So there’s a totally invented language scattered throughout the story. Yeah, I think it doesn’t tickle the same itch for many people. Some people say, ‘I want my dragon to be its own thing, ancient and four-legged’ – they have a very clear idea of what kind of dragon they want in their books. But I think it’s worth adding this in to give people a little bit more variety in their dragon-themed books. There’s so much variety, with the Western approach and the Eastern approach, and the various mythologies… This book is completely unique and different."