The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter

The city is crumbling... Clouds over Nowy Solum have not parted in a hundred years. Gods have deserted their temples. In the last days of a dying city, the decadent chatelaine chooses a forbidden lover, separating twin outcasts and setting them on independent trajectories that might finally bring down the palace. Then, screaming from the skies, a lone god reappears, briefly, and a limbless prophet is carried through South Gate, into Nowy Solum, with a message for all: beyond the city, something ancient and monumental has come awake!

The Arcanist

"On paper, Brent Hayward’s novel shouldn’t work. In the first thirty pages, you’ll meet about four dozen people/things/monsters, across several times and places. Unless your name’s Tolstoy, that’s a non-starter in my dossier. But, I couldn’t put it down. The Fecund’s Melancholy Daughter defies every rule on world building and character development I’ve ever learned, and, somehow, it’s a breathtaking success of a fantasy story. Find yourself a copy, brew some strong coffee, and allow your mind to be blown."

Publishers Weekly

“Where [Head Full of Mountains] stands out from its brethren is in the quality of Hayward’s (Filaria) prose, and the skill with which he carefully details each scene and each character, using well-worn set pieces with an energy and splendor that blinds readers to their essential familiarity.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[The Fecund’s Melancholy Daughter is] beautifully written and morally ambivalent, this complex tale will appeal to readers of Gene Wolfe and China Miéville.”

Alex Good, The Toronto Star

“Toronto’s Brent Hayward has a knack for creating incredibly lush alternative worlds and mythologies, and Head Full of Mountains may be his most complex and demanding work yet. . . . [The protagonist’s] journey suggests an allegory of human development progressing through different stages of life, but readers will probably come up with many other interpretations as well, perhaps seeing in it a nightmare of isolated and introverted consciousness, or the endgame of technologies that have left humanity behind. The result is one of the more different and difficult SF novels of the year, but also one of the most rewarding.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Hayward’s debut [Filaria] is a powerful, beautifully written dystopian tale. . . .”

Examiner.com

“. . . Filaria is simply one of the best books written in the last decade and is the best science fiction/fantasy book that I have read in a long time.”

Peter Watts, author of Starfish and Blindsight

“A disquieting, claustrophobic, compelling hybrid of China Miéville and J. G. Ballard. I first read Filaria almost two years ago: its subterranean imagery has been stuck in my midbrain ever since.”

About the Author

Brent Hayward’s fiction has appeared in several publications and anthologies, including Horizons SF, On Spec, ChiZine, the Tesseracts series, and Chilling Tales. In 2006, his story “Phallex Comes Out” was nominated for the StorySouth Million Writers Award as best online story of that year; it received an honourable mention. Filaria, his first novel, was published by ChiZine Publications in 2008 and has since garnered solid acclaim. Born in London, England, raised in Montreal, he currently lives in Toronto. He can be reached through his LiveJournal at: brenth.livejournal.com.

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