How could you possibly not want to read this book based on that cover alone? The detail, the simple colours, the creatures of myth and legend all interwoven in a beautiful web? I mostly just want to frame it and put it on the wall.

As for the story itself? It sounds right up my street – I love faerie stories which are true to the origins of faeries. Not ones with pink sparkles and pretty flowers, faeries with swords and pointy blackened teeth who steal babies and play ‘tricks’ that often end up in the death of some unsuspecting human. Dreams and Shadows seems to be headed in the direction of those traditional stories which means I will almost definitely love it as much as I love the cover.

Blurb:

A superb contemporary debut fantasy, a dreamlike yet visceral journey through a Faerie land like no other.

In the debut novel DREAMS AND SHADOWS, screenwriter and noted film critic C. Robert Cargill takes us beyond the veil, through the lives of Ewan and Colby, young men whose spirits have been enmeshed with the otherworld from a young age.

This brilliantly crafted narrative – part Neil Gaiman, part Guillermo Del Torro, part William Burroughs – follows the boys from their star-crossed adolescences to their haunted adulthoods. Cargill’s tour-de-force takes us inside the Limestone Kingdom, a parallel universe where whisky swilling genies and foul mouthed wizards argue over the state of the metaphysical realm. Having left the spirit world and returned to the human world, Ewan and Colby discover that the creatures from this previous life have not forgotten them, and that fate can never be sidestepped.

With sensitivity and hopeful examination, Cargill illuminates a supernatural culture that all too eerily resembles our own. Set in a richly imagined and constructed world, complete with its own richly detailed history and mythology, DREAMS AND SHADOWS is a deeply engaging story about two extraordinary boys becoming men.

What books are you lusting after this week?