Stephen Hunt's Jack Cloudie (with new cover design)

Amazon.co.uk have revealed the cover to the next Stephen Hunt novel, titled Jack Cloudie, as well as the cover of the paperback edition of Secrets of the Fire Sea.

First of all I'll get my disappointment out of the way. HarperCollins have ditched the lovely retro designs that graced the covers of the first four hardbacks in favour of a generic photoshopped thing. It's not nearly as nice.



Jack Cloudie comes out in hardcover on 7 July 2011 so it's quite a wait. Here's the blurb:

A tale of high adventure and derring-do set in the same Victorian-style world as the acclaimed The Court of the Air and The Secrets of the Fire Sea. Thanks to his father's gambling debts, young Jack Keats finds himself on the streets and trying to survive as a pickpocket, desperate to graft enough coins to keep him and his two younger brothers fed. Following a daring bank robbery gone badly awry, Jack narrowly escapes the scaffold, only to be pressed into Royal Aerostatical Navy. Assigned to the most useless airship in the fleet, serving under a captain who is most probably mad, Jack seems to be bound for almost certain death in the far-away deserts of Cassarabia. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Omar ibn Barir, the slave of a rich merchant lord finds his life turned upside down when his master's religious sect is banned. Unexpectedly freed, he survives the destruction of his home to enter into the service of the Caliph's military forces -- just as war is brewing. Two very similar young men prepare to face each other across a senseless field of war. But is Omar the enemy, or is Jack's true nemesis the sickness at the heart of the Caliph's court? A cult that hides the deadly secret to the origins of the gas being used to float Cassarabia's new aerial navy. If Jack and his shipmates can discover what Cassarabia's aggressive new regime is trying to conceal, he might survive the most horrific of wars and clear his family's name. If not!

The previous book in the series, Secrets of the Fire Sea comes out in paperback on 3 Feb 2011.

Secrets of the Fire Sea by Stephen Hunt, my comments

I've spent the last number of days reading Secrets of the Fire Sea by Stephen Hunt. This is the latest in his series set in a alternate/future steampunk world. I was a big fan of the previous books in the series so I was looking forward to this one.

While the other books included voyages into dangerous foreign lands a lot of the action took place in the Kingdom of Jackals (imagine a version of 19th Century Britain with an aerial navy). Fire Sea in contrast takes place almost entirely on the island of Jago, a volcanic isle inside the arctic circle that is habitable because a civilization developed around the generation of electricity from geothermal energy.

But the human population on Jago is decreasing and now the only city left inhabited is the underground Hermetica City where humans depend on the mercenary army of ursine soldiers to protect them The ursine are a large bear-like people who as it happens have their own claim on the island.

Into the mix is Hannah Conquest, a student at the Circlist cathedral in Jago. Her parents were killed years before after stumbling across a dangerous secret and now Hannah finds herself having to find out what the secret is if she is to survive.

As usual we have a number of imaginative companions for her adventure such as a detective from Jackals and his steamman friend Boxiron. Also returning from the previous books is u-boat commander Commodore Black who once again finds himself in wicked trouble.

Another entertaining adventure, I look forward to the next one.

Secrets of the Fire Sea by Stephen Hunt

A quick visit to Amazon UK today gave me the first sight of the new Stephen Hunt novel, due for publication on 4 February 2010. I'm very glad to see HarperCollins have retained the wonderful retro cover design from the three earlier books in the series.


The "blurb" from the site follows below...

A tale of high adventure and derring-do set in the same Victorian-style world as the acclaimed The Court of the Air and The Rise of the Iron Moon.

The isolated island of Jago is the only place Hannah Conquest has ever known as home. Encircled by the magma ocean of the Fire Sea, it was once the last bastion of freedom when the world struggled under the tyranny of the Chimecan Empire during the age-long winter of the cold-time. But now this once-shining jewel of civilization faces an uncertain future as its inhabitants emigrate to greener climes, leaving the basalt plains and raging steam storms far behind them. For Hannah and her few friends, the streets of the island's last occupied underground city form a vast, near-deserted playground.

But Hannah's carefree existence comes to an abrupt halt when her guardian, Archbishop Alice Gray, is brutally murdered in her own cathedral. Someone desperately wants to suppress a secret kept by the archbishop, and if the attempts on Hannah's own life are any indication, the killer believes that Alice passed the knowledge of it onto her ward before her saintly head was separated from her neck.

But it soon becomes clear that there is more at stake than the life of one orphan. A deadly power struggle is brewing on Jago, involving rival factions in the senate and the island's most powerful trading partner. And it's beginning to look as if the deaths of Hannah's archaeologist parents shortly after her birth were very far from accidental. Soon the race is on for Hannah and her friends to unravel a chain of hidden riddles and follow them back to their source to save not just her own life, but her island home itself.

Hmm. That description was a bit unwieldy and after reading it I'm really not sure what the book is about. But if it is half as entertaining as The Kingdom Beyond the Waves then it'll be a good read.