Ahira's Hangar

Esselmont's Night of Knives is now out in mass market paperback in Canada - so it might finally be easier for US readers to get their hands on it without paying a small fortune.

Cool, I'll probably give it a shot if I can get it for less than 10 bucks. I was in Melbourne, Australia last fall, and picked up a copy in a bookstore there. It would've cost me something ridiculous, like around $40 (with the bad exchange rate, all books were outrageously expensive; mass market paperbacks were $25-30). It's pretty short, so at least if the writing is not up to par you won't be stuck with an 800 page book you don't know what to do with.

Yeah, I have heard that books Down Under are ridiculously expensive. With my reading habits if there were no good library around, I would probably have to take up a couple of extra jobs just to get my hands on books if I lived down there.

The cost of beer down there is even worse. In a pub, it was $8-10 a pint, and a 6-pack in a store was $15-20.

I found a cheap copy of Night of Knives at Amazon marketplace and ordered it a few days ago. I came in the mail yesterday while I was at work, and it cracked me up - instead of being a Canadian import from an American shop, it got shipped to me from England. Even with the overseas shipping it was under $13. So it was about a third of what it was going for just a few weeks ago.

I am not planning on reading it until I finish up the Elric series by Moorcock. I did look at it, though. It is between 400-500 pages and the story supposedly takes place over a 24 hour time span. There is an introduction by Erikson (which I did read and which explains the origins of the Malazan world and Esselmont's place in its formation), and at the end there is the prologue and first chapter to Esselmont's next book, Return of the Cruimson Guard, which I believe will be out in Commonwealth countries late this summer. Like Erikson, Esslemont is a Canadian, and has worked as a professional archaeologist. My page count does not include the preview stuff from the upcoming book, so I am mystified by the fact that so many people call it a novella.

I think that the one that I handled was a trade paperback, and it was maybe 300 pages. I seem to recall that the print and spacing was pretty large. Compared to House of Chains, it's a novella.