K.J. Parker

When you need a memory to be wiped, call me. Transferring unwanted memories to my own mind is the only form of magic I've ever mastered. But now, I'm holding so many memories I'm not always sure which ones are actually mine, any more. Some of them are sensitive; all of them are private. And there are those who are willing to kill to access the secrets I'm trying to bury... A classic Parker tale with a strong supporting cast of princes, courtiers, merchants, academics, and generally unsavory people. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

This is the story of how the City was saved, by Notker the professional liar, written down because eventually the truth always seeps through. The City may be under siege, but everyone still has to make a living. Take Notker, the acclaimed playwright, actor and impresario. Nobody works harder, even when he's not working. Thankfully, the good citizens of Classis appreciate an evening at the theatre even when there are large rocks falling out of the sky. But Notker is a man of many talents, and all the world is, apparently, a stage. It seems that the Empire needs him - or someone who looks a lot like him - for a role that will call for the performance of a lifetime. At least it will guarantee fame, fortune and immortality. If it doesn't kill him first.

Basso the Magnificent. Basso the Great. Basso the Wise. The First Citizen of the Vesani Republic is an extraordinary man. He is ruthless, cunning, and above all, lucky. He brings wealth, power and prestige to his people. But with power comes unwanted attention, and Basso must defend his nation and himself from threats foreign and domestic. In a lifetime of crucial decisions, he's only ever made one mistake. One mistake, though, can be enough.

Hoping for a better life, five war veterans colonize an abandoned island. They take with them everything they could possibly need - food, clothes, tools, weapons, even wives. But an unanticipated discovery shatters their dream and replaces it with a very different one. The colonists feel sure that their friendship will keep them together. Only then do they begin to realize that they've brought with them rather more than they bargained for. For one of them, it seems, has been hiding a terrible secret from the rest of the company. And when the truth begins to emerge, it soon becomes clear that the war is far from over.

Set in the tantalizingly detailed world of much of his other work, No Choice tells the story of a narrator from a landed and politically connected family with a history of losing scions in battle. At first, it isn’t a stalled and seemingly doomed war that concerns the main character, but the fact that his father has been sentenced to death for a murder he most definitely did commit. Political maneuvering and family dynamics come in to play, but to no avail, so off to the wars the narrator sails. There, he conceives a series of nested plans that may very well preserve the life of a man who deserves to die, win a war that nobody should be fighting, and maybe, just maybe, save his own skin in the bargain. Cover illustration by Vincent Chong

In a botched demonic extraction, they say the demon feels it ten times worse than the man. But they don’t die, and we do. Equilibrium. The unnamed and morally questionable narrator is an exorcist with great follow-through and few doubts. His methods aren’t delicate but they’re undeniably effective: he’ll get the demon out — he just doesn’t particularly care what happens to the person. Prosper of Schanz is a man of science, determined to raise the world’s first philosopher-king, reared according to the purest principles. Too bad he’s demonically possessed.

K.J. Parker returns to the amoral world of Prosper's Demon with a wry, sardonic novella that flips the eternal, rule-governed battle between men and demons on its head. An anonymous representative of the Devil, once a high-ranking Duke of Hell and now a committed underachiever, has spent the last forever of an eternity leading a perfectly tedious existence distracting monks from their liturgical devotions. It’s interminable, but he prefers it that way, now that he’s been officially designated by Downstairs as “fragile.” No, he won’t elaborate. All that changes when he finds himself ensnared, along with a sadistic exorcist, in a labyrinthine plot to subvert the very nature of Good and Evil. In such a circumstance, sympathy for the Devil is practically inevitable.

There’s no formal training for battlefield salvage. You just have to pick things up as you go along. Swords, armor, arrows – and the bodies, of course. Over the years, Saevus Corax has picked up a lot of things. Some of them have made him decent money, others have brought nothing but trouble. But it’s a living, and somebody has to deal with the dead. Something else that Saevus has buried is his past. Unfortunately, he didn’t quite succeed.

also appears in the collection Academic Exercises When his father, brothers and uncles wiped each other out in a murderous civil war, Nicephorus was forced to leave the University and become emperor. Seventy-seven emperors had met violent deaths over the past hundred years, most of them murdered by their own soldiers. Hardly surprising, then, that Nico should want to fill the major offices of state with the only people he knew he could trust, his oldest and closest friends. But there's danger on the northern frontier, and Nico daren't send a regular general up there with an army, for fear of a military coup. He turns to his best friend Phormio, who reluctantly takes the job. Military dispatches, written in the purple ink reserved exclusively for official business, are a miserable way for friends to keep in touch, at a time when they need each other most. But there's space in the document-tube for another sheet of paper. Cover illustration by Vincent Chong

When an engineer is sentenced to death for a petty transgression of guild law, he flees the city, leaving behind his wife and daughter. Forced into exile, he seeks a terrible vengeance — one that will leave a trail of death and destruction in its wake. But he will not be able to achieve this by himself. He must draw up his plans using the blood of others...

The unnamed narrator of The Long Game is an Adept, a member of an Ecclesiastical order charged, among other things, with opposing a race of immaterial demons, creatures capable of possessing and controlling human minds. Complicating the narrator’s life is the fact that, over time, he has developed a cordial “relationship” with one of the demons. Complicating matters further is the unexpected arrival of Amalasomtha, a young woman with impossible abilities who claims to have come from the remote — perhaps mythical — country of Idalia. She also claims that, for reasons she does not entirely understand, she has been tasked with capturing one such demon and returning with it to Idalia. The truth, it turns out, is considerably more complex. Amalasomtha’s arrival sets in motion a chain of events encompassing murder, magic, deception, and an array of unintended consequences. By the story’s end, this consistently witty account of demonic possession, hidden agendas and Ecclesiastical politics has taken us to some unexpected places and given us a glimpse of a larger story still, the “long game” that lies at the heart of all human history. Cover illustration by Vincent Chong

Academic Exercises is the first collection of shorter work by master novelist K.J. Parker, and it is a stunner. Weighing in at over 500 pages, this generous volume gathers together thirteen highly distinctive stories, essays, and novellas, including the recent World Fantasy Award-Winner, “Let Maps to Others”. The result is a significant publishing event, a book that belongs on the shelf of every serious reader of imaginative fiction. The collection opens with the World Fantasy Award-winning “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong”, a story of music and murder set against a complex mentor/pupil relationship, and closes with the superb novella “Blue & Gold”, which features what may be the most beguiling opening lines in recent memory. In between, Parker has assembled a treasure house of narrative pleasures. In “A Rich, Full Week”, an itinerant “wizard” undergoes a transformative encounter with a member of the “restless dead.” “Purple & Black”, the longest story in the book, is an epistolary tale about a man who inherits the most hazardous position imaginable: Emperor. “Amor Vincit Omnia” recounts a confrontation with a mass murderer who may have mastered an impossible form of magic. Rounding out the volume — and enriching it enormously — are three fascinating and illuminating essays that bear direct relevance to Parker’s unique brand of fiction: “On Sieges”, “Cutting Edge Technology”, and “Rich Men’s Skins”. Taken singly, each of these thirteen pieces is a lovingly crafted gem. Together, they constitute a major and enduring achievement. Rich, varied, and constantly absorbing, Academic Exercises is, without a doubt, the fantasy collection of the year. Contents: - A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong (2011) - A Rich, Full Week (2010) - Amor Vincit Omnia (2010) - On Sieges (2009) - Let Maps to Others (2012) - A Room with a View (2011) - Cutting Edge Technology (2011) - Illuminated (2012) - Purple and Black (2009) - Rich Men’s Skins; A Social History of Armour (2013) - The Sun and I (2013) - One Little Room an Everywhere (2012) - Blue and Gold (2010) Cover illustration by Vincent Chong

Long ago, a wealthy man stole an angel and hid her in a chapel, where she remains imprisoned to this day. That’s the legend, anyway. A clerical student who’s racked up gambling debts to a local gangster is given an ultimatum ― deliver the angel his grandfather kidnapped, or forfeit various body parts in payment. And so begins a whirlwind theological paradox ― with the student at its center ― in which the stakes are the necessity of God, the existence of destiny ― and the nature of angels.

A new stand-alone novel from the acclaimed author of The Company and The Folding Knife.Gignomai is the youngest brother in the current generation of met'Oc, a once-noble family exiled on an island for their role in a vaguely remembered civil war.On this island, a colony was founded seventy years ago. The plan was originally for the colonists to mine silver, but there turned out not to be any.Now, an uneasy peace exists on the island, between the colonists and the met'Oc. The met'Oc are tolerated, in spite of occasional cattle stealing raids, since they alone possess the weapons considered necessary protection against the island's savages.Gignomai is about to discover exactly what it is expected of him, and what it means to defy his family. He is the hammer who will provide the spark that will ignite a brutal and bloody war.

"Why are we fighting this war? Because evil must be resisted, and sooner or later there comes a time when men of principle have to make a stand. But at this stage in the proceedings," he added, with a slightly lopsided grin, "mostly from force of habit."A soldier with a gift for archery. A woman who kills without care. Two brothers, both unbeatable generals, now fighting for opposing armies. No one in the vast and once glorious United Empire remains untouched by the rift between East and West, and the war has been fought for as long as anyone can remember. Some still survive who know how it was started, but no one knows how it will end. Except, perhaps, the Two of Swords.World Fantasy Award-winning author K. J. Parker delivers the first volume of his most ambitious work yet-the story of a war on a grand scale, told through the eyes of soldiers, politicians, victims, and heroes.

This is the story of Orhan, son of Siyyah Doctus Felix Praeclarissimus, and his history of the Great Siege, written down so that the deeds and sufferings of great men may never be forgotten. A siege is approaching, and the city has little time to prepare. The people have no food and no weapons, and the enemy has sworn to slaughter them all. To save the city will take a miracle, but what it has is Orhan. A colonel of engineers, Orhan has far more experience with bridge-building than battles, is a cheat and a liar, and has a serious problem with authority. He is, in other words, perfect for the job.

A Practical Guide to Conquering the World can be read by itself, but for those who like endings it can also be considered the refreshingly pragmatic conclusion to World Fantasy Award-winning author K.J. Parker’s acclaimed sequence of novels that began with Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and continue with How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It. This is the true story of Aemilius Felix Boioannes the younger, the intended and unintended consequences of his life, the bad stuff he did on purpose, and the good stuff that happened in spite of him. It is, in other words, the tale of a war to end all wars, and the man responsible.