The Pattern Scars

Nola is born into poverty in Sarsenay City. When her mother realizes that Nola has the gift of Othersight and can foretell the future, she sells her to a brothel seer, who teaches the girl to harness her gift. As she grows up, she embraces her new life, and even finds a small circle of friends. All too soon, her world is again turned upside down when one of them is murdered. When a handsome, young Otherseer from the castle promises to teach her, she eagerly embraces the prospects of luxury beyond what she can imagine and safety from a killer who stalks girls by night. Little does she know that he will soon draw her into a web of murder, treachery, and obsessive desire that will threaten the people and land she holds dear, and that she will soon learn the harshest of lessons: that being able to predict the future has nothing to do with being able to prevent it.

Ilana C. Myer, author of Last Song Before Night

“These books infuse the myth of Theseus with the haunted complexities of a labyrinth, made the more unsettling by Sweet’s sensuous prose. The Flame in the Maze is a book of both horror and beauty, conveying each with equal, delicate precision.”

The Huffington Post

“Caitlin Sweet’s shimmering prose, already apparent in her debut novel A Telling of Stars, reaches new heights in The Pattern Scars, which is so replete with luminous images and an evocative atmosphere that even now, a week later, these sensations still haunt my memory as if they had been real, a country I visited and would return to again. It should have been a relief to awaken from The Pattern Scars, after all its horrors. Yet the richness of the world, the complexity of the main character, and the intensity of her tragedy evoke memories that linger for a long time. It is the rare reader who could read this book and be unaffected―or unscathed.”

SF Site

“[Sweet writes] a world with so much possibility and so much beauty, woven with an adept style that really does convince [me] that Caitlin Sweet is a formidable new talent.”

About the Author

Caitlin Sweet’s first fantasy novel, A Telling of Stars, was published by Penguin Canada in 2003. Her second, The Silences of Home, was published in 2005. Her one and only short story, “To Play the Game of Men,” was included in Daw’s Ages of Wonder anthology in 2009. Her novel The Pattern Scars, came out from CZP in 2011, and was nominated for Sunburst and Aurora awards, and reviewed to much acclaim in the Huffington Post.

Reviews

News