Cover art by Marc Simonetti

In her 2017 guest post at Tor.com ,”Walk Beneath the Canopy of These 8 Fictional Forests,” Thoraiya Dyer wrote:

Give me your Fangorns and your Lothloriens, your Green Hearts and your Elvandars. Evoke your Haunted Forest Beyond the Wall complete with creepy weirwoods, your Steddings and your Avendesoras. Send me pleasant dreams about Totoro’s Japanese Camphor and the Forest Spirit’s kodama-filled canopy. Or, y’know, tree cities full of Wookiees instead of elves. I will take them all!

Forests in speculative fiction novels have a special place in my heart. Especially tree-cities.

Now there’s a woman who talks my language. Tree cities! Haunted forests! Creepy weirwoods! Kodama-filled canopies!(Uh, what?) Whatever, just tell me Dyer has a more than casual interest in tree cities. Like a book trilogy or something?

Yeah, it’s a rhetorical question. I write a book blog; everybody I talk about has a book trilogy. Dyer’s is titled Titan’s Forest, in which trees loom large as skyscrapers, mortals can be reborn as gods, and a young man sets out on an epic woodland journey to unlock the great Forest’s hidden secrets. It opened with Crossroads of Canopy (Tor Books, 2017), her debut novel; Echoes of Understorey was published last year, and the third book Tides of the Titans arrived earlier this year.

[Click the images for Ent-sized versions.]

Publishers Weekly gave Crossroads of Canopy a rave review, saying (in part):

An ambitious young woman fiercely chases her destiny through an enormous, lush forest in Dyer’s superb, epic, and hypnotic debut, which launches the Titan’s Forest trilogy. In the great Forest, where the trees are “seven hundred people-lengths tall” and a single tree can house an entire city, 13 gods inhabit the upper Canopy, where the brown-skinned elite live luxurious lives in the sun and are protected by a magical barrier that keeps out the poor pale citizens of the lower darker Understory and Floor… Readers will be delighted by Dyer’s polished prose and an exquisite new world of intricate mythology, rituals, and politics.

All three books were published by Tor; the first in hardcover, and the last two in trade paperback. Here’s the complete deets (links will take you to our previous coverage at Black Gate.)

Crossroads of Canopy (333 pages, $25.99 in hardcover/$15.99 trade paper/$12.99 digital, January 2017)
Echoes of Understorey (350 pages, $16.99 trade paper/$9.99 digital, February 2018)
Tides of the Titans (320 pages, $19.99 trade paper/$9.99 digital, January 2019)

The cover art for all three is by Marc Simonetti.

I know, I know. Who has time to start a new trilogy, even if it does have weirwoods and cool tree cities? I hear you. Try it out by listening to a short story in the same world, “The Chimney-Borer and the Tanner,” at the awesome PodCastle.

When you’re done with that, you can read the complete first three chapters of Crossroads of Canopy at Tor.com. (and check out their fascinating cover reveal for the first novel here).

See all our coverage of Series Fantasy here.