Tanith Lee

The struggle between the two families for space on the Isle of the Dead, the overcrowded burial ground for generations of Venetian nobility, boils over and a fourteen-year-old girl is forced to pay the ultimate price. As the years pass on, parties complicit in her disappearance begin to suffer the consequences in a series of shocking deaths. A humble apprentice gravedigger is left to sort out the mysteries and subdue the ancient terror that threatens...

A macabre dark fantasy of enchantment, misfortune, corruption, and death The unnerving third volume of the Secret Books of Paradys begins with a fable of two doomed weddings. In The Weasel Bride, a white weasel transforms into a fair maiden under the light of a full moon. A local trapper releases the animal from its curse by marrying it, but on their wedding day, the weasel inflicts the groom with a fatal wound. This tale flows into the story of a...

When a stranger is captured by the Guards of the House and Garden where she has worked all her life as a slave and maid, sixteen-year-old Claidi helps him escape and sets out with him to journey to his home city through the dangerous Waste.

On the day of her wedding to Argul, Claidi is kidnapped by armed men in a hot-air balloon.

What if Snow White were the real villain and the "wicked queen" just a sadly maligned innocent? What if awakening Sleeping Beauty would be the mistake of a lifetime - of several lifetimes? What if the famous folk tales were retold with an eye to more horrific possibilities? Only Tanith Lee - "Goddess-Empress of the Hot Read" (Village Voice) could retell the world-famous tales of the Brothers Grimm (and others) as they might have been told by the Sisters...

A princess born without feet must learn how to walk-and eventually how to rule-in this dark epic fantasy by an award-winning author. Acclaimed author Tanith Lee transports her readers to an ominous yet seductive alternate universe, as fully realized as Marion Zimmer Bradley's Avalon, where fate organizes the forces of nature to bring to ruin those who dare to control it. Horrible screams pierce the night air as the Daystar, Queen Hesta of Akhemony,...

Sometimes when people die, it comes as a great shock. Even to them…A group of the dead linger here, in the yellow dwelling on the hill – once a castle, then a stately home, now falling into ruin.These ghosts drift and mingle, and brood on their lost lives. Death can be caused by so many things – war, pandemics, ordinary murder – even suicide or accident. Even time. But after death, surely, one could hope for peace? Not any more.For with 2020...

The final novel in the alchemical thriller series set in an alternate Venice by the World Fantasy Award–winning author of A Bed of Earth. Centuries into the future, the sunken city of Venus has been salvaged from beneath the sea and rebuilt there under a dome, where it is supported by a vast network of computers that regulate weather, noise, and the most precious undersea commodity of all-air. It is here that a macabre experiment takes place. Conducted...

Following Faces Under Water, Tanith Lee's alchemical thriller series continues with a Joan of Arc–inspired novel set in an alternate medieval Venice. In Saint Fire, the second volume in the Secret Books of Venus series, Volpa is a strangely beautiful servant girl who glows with an inhuman inner flame. When her master, an abusive wood seller, is mysteriously incinerated, Volpa discovers her power of fire. Her gift is noticed by the Church leaders,...

In this new collection, which contains most of the ghost stories of Tanith Lee – including 4 new tales original to this volume – Lee slips freely through the full gamut of Fantasy, SF, Horror, Historical, Parallel and Contemporary genres. The themes range, amongst others, with a lost love in early 20th Century New Zealand, a bullied child in 1970's India, into the underhill palace of a brooding magician in search of wonders, among the guests of...