Open your mind at this year’s festival and step outside your comfort zone, whether that means looking into a different genre, a new perspective or a topic that’s foreign to you. We will use the hashtag #READdifferent to celebrate that challenge at the AJC DBF. The festival provides a breadth of content to give nearly everyone an opportunity to #READdifferent.
Not sure where to start on your journey of literary exploration and discovery? We’re here to help! Each week we will be featuring a new theme or genre that you can use to READdifferent at the 2016 AJC Decatur Book Festival.
Are your literary tastes rooted in reality? Or do you long to escape from the real world and travel to a realm of magic and sorcery? These thrilling titles from the 2016 AJC DBF will spark your imagination and transport you to alternate realities of mystery and adventure, where magic is all around.
The follow up to A Darker Shade of Magic, V.E Schwab’s A Gathering of Shadows takes the reader to a world of magic, adventure, and multiple Londons. Restless, and having given up smuggling, Kell is visited by dreams of ominous magical events. As Red London finalizes preparations for the Element Games-an extravagant international competition of magic, a certain pirate ship draws closer, carrying old friends back into port. While Red London is caught up in the pageantry and thrills of the Games, another London is coming back to life, and those who were thought to be forever gone have returned.
Wake of Vultures is the first novel in Lila Bowen’s Shadow series and introduces Nettie Lonesome, a young woman who is much more than she seems. Nettie dreams of a better life than toiling as a slave in the sandy desert. Now she’s got everything she ever wanted: friends, a good horse, and a better gun. But if she can’t kill the thing haunting her nightmares and stealing children across the prairie, she’ll lose it all — and never find out what happened to her real family. Monsters, magic and the supernatural combine in this epic debut in which Nettie must defeat the evil hiding beneath the surface.
Beautiful Creatures meets Daughter of Smoke and Bone with an infusion of Latin American tradition in Labyrinth Lost, a highly original fantasy adventure from Zoraida Córdova. Alex is a bruja, the most powerful witch in a generation, and she hates magic. At her Deathday celebration, Alex performs a spell to rid herself of her power. But it backfires. Her whole family vanishes into thin air, leaving her alone with Nova, a brujo boy she can’t trust, a boy whose intentions are as dark as the strange markings on his skin. The only way to get her family back is to travel with Nova to Los Lagos, a land in-between, as dark as Limbo and as strange as Wonderland.
Laia is determined to break into Kauf — the Empire’s most secure and dangerous prison—and save her brother. And Elias is determined to stay by Laia’s side, even if it means giving up his own chance at freedom. But Elias and Laia will have to fight every step of the way if they’re going to outsmart their enemies: the bloodthirsty Emperor Marcus, the merciless Commandant, the sadistic Warden of Kauf, and, most heartbreaking of all, Helene — Elias’s former friend. Sabaa Tahir’s A Torch Against the Night follows these two fugitives as they escape the city of Serra and journey across the vast lands of the Martial Empire.
The great city of Alt Coulumb is in crisis. The moon goddess Seril, long thought dead, is back—and the people of Alt Coulumb aren’t happy. Tara Abernathy, the in-house Craftswoman, must defend the fire god’s church against the world’s fiercest necromantic firm — and against her old classmate, a rising star in the Craftwork world. Skeleton kings drink frozen cocktails; jails, hospitals, and temples are broken into and out of; and choirs of flame sing over Alt Coulumb in Four Roads Cross: A Novel of the Craft Sequence (Craft Sequence #5), Max Gladstone’s thrilling follow up to Three Parts Dead.