Brandon Sanderson’s The Bands of Mourning, the latest novel in the Mistborn series, was published last week by Tor Books. To celebrate, Tor graciously made one autographed copy available to Black Gate, and we offered it to our readers in a contest.

All you had to do to enter was send us an e-mail with a one-sentence summary of why you’d like to read it. We were inundated with entries, and today we selected one winner at random, using the most reliable method of random number generation known to modern science — D&D dice.

As you can imagine, Black Gate readers were pretty creative in their responses. Here’s Andrew Meyer:

I think the evolution of the metallurgy magic mechanic into a industrial setting is fantastic.

Anna Raj took a romantic approach, with a run-on sentence:

My newly fiance is an avid Brandon Sanders reader, who cheats on me with mini dates of his books; going to the bathroom with the book tightly gripped inside his arms, going for midday coffee to the local bookstore sitting in the corner with another of his books and reading it over and over again as to where the pages are barely on the spine; I probably would be a part of ‘the band of the mourning’ when he comes across this book, but I love to see his smile.

George Kelley went old school.

I’m a huge fan of the Mistborn series and would love to win this latest volume!

David Keith took the grumpy approach:

Given Sanderson’s very public stance on Gay Marriage; seeing that we ought to have had civil unions instead of full marriage rights, I’m not convinced anyone ought to be reading entertainment from the pen of a bigot but I’ll take a signed copy to sell for a few bucks. Would I read a novel by a man that claims blacks shouldn’t marry whites? Same diff. Different decade.

And Fred Lovisyn tried just being honest:

I haven’t read a book by Brandon Sanderson yet.

We love all of your answers (well, most of ’em), but we had to choose a winner. And that winner is….

George Kelley

Congratulations George! And a big thank you to everyone who entered our contest, and especially to Tor Books for providing the prize and making the contest possible.

The Bands of Mourning was published on January 26 by Tor Books. It is 448 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover, or $14.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Chris McGrath.

Learn more about The Bands of Mourning, and the previous books in the Mistborn series, in our previous coverage here.