Source: An Amberlight Novel

Amberlight #3

by Sylvia Kelso

On the River, after the fall of Amberlight, Tellurith and her folk meet the greatest crisis of all...

Demolition

A great lord's power and position, lost...

A seven-hundred year old regime, collapsed...

Love and loyalty tried past breaking point....

Destruction

Bloody revolution...

A threat become loss too tragic to forget....

Discovery

Goals suffered and sacrificed for, to evaporate in the hands...

Love undreamt of, unheralded, unforeseen...

Secrets to shatter an empire....

Disaster

Loss of love, loss of home, loss and more loss in battle...

Grief, torment, immanent ruin of all dreams, all hopes....

Revelation

Calamity, shock, enemies' dissolution...

Undreamt of victory...

Secrets that transform the heart....

Resolution

Love renewed, recovered, forever changed...

Love, after long suffering, fulfilled....

Renewal

A new dawn for the River...

A new, utterly different life...

"Amberlight is peopled with vivid characters that stormed up off the page into permanent residence in my mind and memory, in a unique world, and driving an original plot. If some writers' prose sings, Kelso's is an opera." --Lois ​McMaster ​Bujold, Author of Paladin of Souls​ .

"Sumptuous, sensuous, and passionate, ​​Amberlight is completely delightful. Sylvia Kelso is a master of world-building, beautiful prose, and sheer romance.​" --Delia Sherman,​ co-author of​ The Fall of the Kings

Genres: Fantasy

528 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 13, 2010

About the author

Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia. She writes fantasy and SF set in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which, The Moving Water (2006) and Amberlight (2007) were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards.
Her most recent novel-length work is a two-volume contemporary fantasy, the Blackston Gold series, The Solitaire Ghost, and The Time Seam.
Her novella, "Spring in Geneva," a riff on Frankenstein , came out from Aqueduct in 2013.
She has also published short stories in Australian and US anthologies, including "The Cretaceous Border" in Neverlands from Susurrus Press, "The Sharp-Shooter" in New Ceres Nights from 12th Planet Press, and "An Offer You Couldn't Refuse" in Love and Rockets from DAW. She lives in a house with a lot of trees but no cats.

Reviews

[Warren Rochelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Source, a worthy sequel to the first two books in Kelso's Riverworld, Amberlight and Riversend, is a multilayered, complex tale of love, family (in its many permutations), war, politics, friendship, and the supernatural. It continues the adventures of familiar characters, such as Telllurith, Head of her House,who has fled from the wreckage of Amberlight to Iskarda, with her two consorts, Sarth, and Alkhes, and others loyal to her, seeking to construct a new gender-equal society. With them has now come Tanekhet, a lord of the empire, who also seeks a new life, and a better world based on changed relations between men and women.

Now, Tellurith and company has been sent on a Quest sent by the qherrique, the ongoing mystery of this series--a sentient crystal, a mineral, and psychic and just what does it want? Led by a common dream of a mysterious springhead, they must find the Source of the River, the center of their world. Tanekhet stays behind to act as political advisor in Iskarda, while he struggles to adjust to this new life he has chosen, in which the old and the new continue to clash.

Told in an exchange of thoughtful and painfully honest letters between Tanekhet and Tellurith, this is a story of a journey like no other, There and Back Again (we hope), haunted by war, struggles for liberation, unexpected love, revelation, and loss.

And the world of the River will never be the same.

Highly recommended, a thoughtful, provocative, rich fantasy.