Welcome to a Gilded Era like you've never before known and will never be able to forget … If Titania herself were to commission a book, it would be this one.-Fran Wilde, two-time Nebula Award-winning author of Updraft and RiverlandCooney's lush follow-up to Desdemona and the Deep offers five stories linked by an intricate shared world … Throughout, Cooney's descriptions are extravagant and gorgeous, and the musical cadence of her prose makes it exceptionally easy to be drawn into the worlds she weaves … Romantic fantasy readers will find a lot to love.-Publishers WeeklyA young human painter and an ageless gentry queen fall in love over spilled wine-at the risk of his life and her immortality. Pulled into the Veil Between Worlds, two feuding neighbors (and a living statue) get swept up in a brutal war of succession. An investigative reporter infiltrates the Seafall City Laundries to write the exposé of a lifetime, and uncovers secrets she never believed possible. Returning to an oak grove to scatter her husband's ashes, an elderly widow meets an otherworldly friend, who offers her a momentous choice. Two gentry queens of the Valwode plot to hijack a human rocketship and steal the moon out of the sky.Dark Breakers gathers three new and two previously uncollected tales from World Fantasy Award-winning writer C. S. E. Cooney that expand on the thrice-enfolded worlds first introduced in her Locus and World Fantasy award-nominated novella Desdemona and the Deep. In her introduction to Dark Breakers, Crawford Award-winning author Sharon Shinn advises those who pick up this book to settle in for a fantastical read full of vivid world-building, with layer upon layer of detail; prose so dense and gorgeous you can scoop up the words like handfuls of jewels; a mischievous sense of humor; and a warm and hopeful heart.C. S. E. Cooney's prose is like a cake baked by the fairies-beautifully layered, rich and precise, so delicious that it should be devoured with a silver fork.-Theodora Goss, World Fantasy and Mythopoeic Award-winning author of The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club seriesDark Breakers is compounded of voluptuous invention and ferocious structural loves-for new romances and old friends, for the works of hands, for mortality and its gifts, and all the possibilities of worlds bleeding, weeping, wandering into each other's arms.-Kathleen Jennings, World Fantasy Award-winning author of FlyawayFew people create worlds as lavish and sensual as those that spring from Cooney's effervescent imagination. Her writing isn't so much inspirational, but inspiration itself: gentry-magic spun into pages and paragraphs of glittering, fizzing, jaw-dropping beauty.-Cassandra Khaw, British Fantasy Award-nominated author of The All-Consuming WorldMORE PRAISE FOR C. S. E. COONEYC. S. E. Cooney is one of the most moving, daring, and plainly beautiful voices to come out of recent fantasy. She's a powerhouse with a wink in her eye and a song in each pocket.-Catherynne M. Valente, New York Times-bestselling author of Space OperaC. S. E. Cooney's imagination is wild and varied, her stories bawdy, horrific, comic, and moving-frequently all at the same time.-Delia Sherman, author of The Evil Wizard Smallbone
