The Hurricane Wars

"This was such an interesting book for me; it’s fantasy, but has sci-fi elements to it too. It’s a magical high fantasy world, and our main character, Talasyn, is part of a nation that’s under attack by the Night Empire. She’s a foot soldier trying to protect her homeland, and then she runs into Prince Alaric of the Night Empire who realises she’s secretly a light weaver, with all this magic… Over a fair amount of time, they keep bumping into each other and almost killing each other, but they just can’t do it – they keep letting each other get away – there’s something about them. Then Talasyn finds out that she’s actually the heir to a neutral territory that’s not part of this conflict – secret royalty. We love a secret royalty trope. She needs to work with this prince to combine their powers: the light and the darkness. I think it was inspired by Reylo fan fiction, you can see the elements in there, but it’s totally a unique world too. The world-building’s incredible. Guanzon’s from the Philippines, and that informs the world… I’ve lived in a lot of different countries as a wildlife biologist, on four different continents, in a lot of different jungles, and tried to learn a lot of different languages. I love a fantasy story where you can tell that the author’s really thought about the entirety of the culture, from the food to the textiles they’re wearing to their inside jokes, or things that don’t translate into other languages, and a belief system that might be different from region to region… World-building where you can really immerse yourself in it, and feel like you’re in this other place. The way that the prose was written in The Hurricane Wars too, it just felt like a treat. You stop and say, “Oh, that’s just beautiful. I love that sentence.” So it felt like an indulgent read. Yes! My first series was about fae, witches and humans, set around the five different countries that I’ve spent most of my time living in. So there are different courts that are kind-of South Africa and Guatemala and New Zealand… I just felt like it would be fun to have a not-completely Eurocentric fantasy view of the world, but have lots of different regions with their own fantasy systems – as opposed to the Middle Earth inspiration that I think a lot of us pull from, us Tolkien nerds."