Singer From The Sea An accomplished student and heiress to a great title, Genevieve has been brought up as a Proper Young Lady, carefully instructed in the Covenants - the inflexible laws governing women of her class - and knowing she must soon take up the time-honoured responsibilities of womanhood: to marry a nobleman of her father's choosing and to bear a child at the age of thirty.
But Genevieve has another side to her: the girl who remembers all the stories and the secret knowledge learned from her mother, now long dead, the girl who yearns to heed the call of the sea - though she has never even seen the vast waters that cover most of the surface of her home planet of Haven. And as her fate, to marry the loathsome Prince Delganor, fast approaches, she begins to question the ties that bind her: why noblewomen must wait until thirty to have children, why so many die in childbirth, while peasants thrive into their eigties, and, most of all, why she must wed a man she detests, rather than the commoner she adores.
And as Genevieve begins to uncover bitter truths about the seemingly backward planet of Haven, so a voice crying out across centuries begins to drive her to a strange destiny. For if it is not fulfilled, the entire civilisation of Haven is doomed to be swept away on a cosmic sea of oblivion, to vanish, without a trace, as if it had never been. 'Sheri S. Tepper takes the mental risks that are the lifeblood of science fiction and all imaginative narrative' Ursula K. Le Guin
‘No writer of lesser vision or dexterity could have conceived, let alone carried off, such a project’ Washington Post
'One of SF’s most distinctive voices' Locus
'Yet another deeply felt, brilliantly wrought ecological-feminist parable, not threatening but challenging, liberating and wise: Tepper has lodged firmly on a pinnacle of excellence' Kirkus
British Pbk Original - Voyager (1999)
Six Moon Dance EARTH is a remote ancestral memory, or a theme park exhibit. On behalf of the Council of Worlds an artificial intelligence named the Questioner examines and punishes bad behaviour towards both nonhuman species and ethnic minorities in far flung human settlements.
THE QUESTIONER'S attention is drawn to the small,
barely industrialized world of Newholme. This is scary for the people of Newholme, especially the women who run it, who keep very big bad secrets... which will be revealed, though the Questioner is not there to uncover Newholme's crimes. Rather, the Questioner is haunted by a story she heard of an interstellar creature, older than life on Earth, surviving, though mutilated, on one of the six moons of Newholme... Sheri Stewart Tepper was born in Colorado, where she lived until recently. For many years she worked for various non-profit-making organizations, and was a writer of children's stories. She sold her first adult novel in 1982. As well as science fiction and fantasy novels, Sheri Tepper has written crime and horror novels under her own name and various pseudonyms. She now lives in New Mexico. Her fantasy novel Beauty was voted best novel of the year by readers of Locus, and her recent science fiction novels,
Gibbon's Decline and Fall and The Family Tree, were shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. 'A shining, bravura performance.' Publishers Weekly
'A marvellously complex book, filled with humanity seen, and felt, at its best and its worst ...a genuine page-turner.' Locus
Paperback - Gollancz (2002)
Raising the Stones When the human settlers arrived on Hobbs Land, the native intelligent species, the Owlbrit, were already almost extinct. Before the last one died, a few years later, the humans had learned a little of their language, their ideas and their religion. It seemed the natural thing for the settlers to maintain the last Owlbrit temple, with the strange statue that was its God. When that God died -disintegrating overnight - it seemed equally natural to start preparing its replacement. Maire Manone came to Hobbs Land to escape the harsh patriarchal religion of Voorstod, but Voorstod hasn’t forgotten her - or forgiven her. But the men who arrive on Hobbs Land to find and return Maire to her homeland haven’t taken Hobbs Land’s God into account . . . ‘Incandescent… Tepper has outdone herself’ Stephen R. Donaldson
‘Tepper effectively combines satire, inventive social engineering, strong main characters and a plot that works on both internal anti external levels in what may be her best novel to date’ Kirkus
‘Tepper has as sure a story-telling hand as you will find today’ Analog
`Imaginative . . .Tepper builds strange rich worlds with distinct cultures breathing their own realities’ Publishers Weekly
Paperback - Gollancz Millenium (2001)
Beauty On her sixteenth birthday, the princess Beauty sidesteps the sleeping curse placed upon her by her wicked aunt, the fairy Carabosse - only to be kidnapped by visitors from another time and place, far from the picturesque castle in fourteenth century England.
She is taken to the world of the future, a savage society where, even amongst the teeming billions, she is utterly alone. And as she travels magically to places both imaginary and real, Beauty eventually comes to understand her special place in humanity’s destiny Fantasy Masterworks is a library of some of the greatest, most original, and most influential fantasy ever written. These are the books which, along with Tolkien, Peake and others, shaped modern fantasy ‘Beauty slips its message like a knife through skin and brain and bone . . . It is brilliant and subtle and fabulous’ The New York Review of Science Fiction
`Beauty lives up to its name in all ways. It is a story of mankind and magic, fairies and fairytales, future and fantasy, all intertwined into a complex collage . . .The writing is immaculate and the storytelling immaculate, so get it’ Time Out
`Rich, multitudinous, witty, metaphysical, continually surprising, Beauty is a feast' Locus
'Tepper is a wise and compassionate narrator, and when it comes to spinning a yarn that you don't ever want to stop reading, there are few better spinners than she is' Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
`Wonderfully inventive re-working of the Sleeping Beauty story... an astounding odyssey of time-travel and adventure' The Northern Echo
'Magnificent ...This adult fairy story entertains and delivers a message in the best tradition of the fantasy classics' The Denver Post
Singer From The Sea
Singer From The Sea