Covers by Richard Anderson

Kameron Hurley has had a charmed career, and she’s just getting started. Her debut novel God’s War was nominated for a Nebula Award, and she won a Hugo in 2014 for Best Related Work. But her most ambitious work so far has been the Worldbreaker Saga. Opening novel The Mirror Empire came in third in the 2015 Locus Poll for Best Fantasy novel, and Library Journal said “This is a hugely ambitious work, bloody and violent… [an] imaginative tangle of multiple worlds and histories colliding.” In his feature review of the second volume Empire Ascendant at Grimdark Magazine, Sean Grigsby wrote:

Kameron Hurley’s Worldbreaker Saga is about as grimdark as fantasy literature can get… To catch you up, The Mirror Empire introduced us to a world where the people worship four distinct celestial bodies: Tira, Para, Sina, and Oma. Certain gifted individuals can call on the “breath” of these bodies to help them perform all kinds of cool magic. However, only one body is in the sky at a time, sometimes not returning for a thousand years. Those gifted by the ascendant star are more powerful than those whose comet is in decline.

But it’s when Oma appears, that everyone gets worried. It signals the clashing of worlds, when the thread between parallel universes becomes so thin that crossing between them becomes possible. But the catch is that your “mirror” self has to be dead in the universe you want to cross into. So when Kirana’s world is coming to a cataclysmic end, she has a lot of people to kill on the other side so all of the people in her world can come over…

There were many awesome moments in Empire Ascendant. Some that had me severely creeped out or squirming in my seat. One especially intense scene that I really enjoyed is when legionnaire Zezili crawls into the lair of monsters and comes across a disgusting creature straight out of nightmares. If Hurley ever tried her hand at horror, she’d do fantastically.

The closing book in the trilogy, The Broken Heavens, arrives next month from Angry Robot. Here’s the publisher’s description.

The bloodsoaked conclusion to Kameron Hurley’s epic fantasy masterpiece – the Worldbreaker Saga – is unleashed.

The Dhai nation has broken apart under the onslaught of the Tai Mora, invaders from a parallel world. With the Dhai in retreat, Kirana, leader of the Tai Mora, establishes a base in Oma’s temple and instructs her astrologers to discover how they can use the ancient holy place to close the way between worlds.

With the connected worlds ravaged by war and Oma ascendant, only one world can survive. Who will be sacrificed, and who will be saved, when the heavens finally break?

Here’s the details for the complete series.

1 The Mirror Empire (535 pages, $14.99 trade paperback/$6.99 digital, August 2014)
2 Empire Ascendant (458 pages, $14.99 trade paperback/$7.99 paperback/$6.99 digital, October 2015)
3 The Broken Heavens (464 pages, $16.99 trade paperback/$9.99 digital, January 14, 2020)

All three volumes were published by Angry Robot, with covers by Richard Anderson.

Our previous coverage of Kameron Hurley includes:

The Stars Are Legion (2017)
The Light Brigade (2019)

See all of our coverage of the very best in series fantasy here.