Witch Honour

by Narrelle M. Harris

Short-listed in 1998 for the George Turner Award for unpublished manuscripts, Witch Honour was subsequently published in 2005 by Five Star Speculative Fiction in hardback. In 2011, Witch Honour is now back in print as an e-book!

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Four women are drawn together by their special powers and their personal demons to find peace. They would rather keep to themselves, in this distant world where witches aren’t trusted and the shadows of long lost technology live on in a religion of ancestor-worship.

But when a group of exiles comes to Tunston with news of the overthrow of King Armand of Tyne by his cousin and the witch Zuleika Tallan, everything changes. Sylvia, the eldest witch, has an old regret to confront and her friends, Magda, Leenan and Tephee, won’t let her face it alone. The witches, each with their own issues to face, join the deposed court to seek out the deposed King and return him to the throne.

But the ragtag remnants of the court have problems of their own: betrayal, honour, loyalty, love and revenge are not going to make this an easy quest for anyone.

Genres: Fantasy

Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

I grew up in a home bursting with books. My father was in the Royal Australian Air Force – we moved roughly every three years – and my parents were passionate advocates of reading and the importance of access to a library of ideas, no matter where we lived.

Between a childhood spent on the move yet steeped in literature, and a naturally dramatic personality, it’s no surprise I became a storyteller.

At home, and at libraries all over Australia, I read everything from Little Golden Books to The World Book Encyclopaedia. As my family moved so frequently, my companions wherever I went were the Pevensies of Narnia, a horse named Flicka and the Hardy Boys. I grew up with the characters created by Diana Wynne Jones as they too learned independence and responsibility. Miss Marple and the Dragonriders of Pern were always at my side.

Writers like Eric Frank Russell and Lois McMaster Bujold were as influential on my character and my writing as surely as Shakespeare and the Brontes. I’m still always picking up new influences, from modern writers like Emily Larkin and Neil Gaiman as well as classics by PG Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Before you figure I am always and forever reading, I’m a traveller too. My early years spent moving from state to state led to itchy feet. After moving out of the family home, I lived in Perth, then met Tim Richards and we decided to have adventures of our own. We moved to Egypt to teach English as a Foreign Language, then went on to Poland.

After we finished teaching, we kept travelling: we’ve been to the UK and US, to Thailand, Germany, Hungary, Syria, Jordan, France, Italy, Slovenia, Czech, and Canada – and we’re not done travelling yet.

The places I’ve visited – London, Hungary, Canada – often appear in my work, but the home of my heart is the place I write about most often.

Melbourne, Australia. The town we chose to live in always. The city I love so much she is practically a character in her own right in books like The Opposite of Life and short stories like Near Miss. I even researched the Marvellous Melbourne of the 1890s for my Holmes♥Watson romance, The Adventure of the Colonial Boy.

Given my background and all my literary influences, it’s hardly astonishing that my storytelling is eclectic: crime, adventure, fantasy, horror and romance – separately or combined.

For all the different genres I write in, everything I write generally includes the same tone and the same type of themes. They are full of the families one is born with and the families we make for ourselves. The protagonists all face challenges they’ve made for themselves as well as external threats that test them. They’re full of people who’ve made mistakes who seek to learn and to make better choices.

Whether you’re reading a vampire adventure in modern Melbourne, a Holmesian mystery in London or a racy lesbian romance in the Middle East, you’ll find humour, heart, friendships and love.

Awards

Jane: In 2017, my ghost/crime story Jane won the Athenaeum Library’s Body in the Library prize at the Scarlet Stiletto Awards, hosted by Sisters in Crime Australia.

Other nominations and shortlistings include:

Fly By Night (nominated for a Ned Kelly Award 2004)
Witch Honour (shortlisted for the George Turner Prize as Witching Ways in 1998)
Witch Faith (shortlisted for the George Turner Prize in 1999)
Walking Shadows (Chronos Awards; Davitt Awards in 2012)

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Narrelle's erotica published as NM Harris is listed on Goodreads here: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

Reviews

[Heidi · Rating 2 out of 5]

As I read this, I kept wondering if this was the second or third in the series, because the author kept referring to back-story in a way that just filled in the story, like a reminder to the reader, as sequels often do. Nope, it turns out the author had written a longer book, as outlined here, and I wonder if she cut too much. Or I wonder if something about the way she inserts those details isn't as seamless as others I've read, so they hooked my attention as not quite right.

So, this is sort of standard witch fantasy as found on some far away planet. Witches aren't very trusted even when they're good witches, and they draw upon some kind of energy through the earth for their powers. The jester and king's guard need the help of witches to restore their king, and the witches need to battle that enemy anyway, as their mutual nemesis is a witch gone bad. That reminded me a bit of the story of The Tin Man, this past year's scifi channel retelling of The Wizard of Oz. Battle scenes reminded me a bit of The Lord of the Rings , not really my flavor of fantasy.