As featured in Publishers Weekly!

World Fantasy Award finalist for Best Collection
Locus Award finalist for Best Story Collection
Locus Magazine Recommended Reading List

Dark Breakers

by C. S. E. Cooney

introduction by Sharon Shinn

“Welcome to a Gilded Era like you’ve never before known and will never be able to forget. C. S. E. Cooney’s Dark Breakers will transfix and transform you, and, should you chance upon its characters in a glittering hallway, you had best be wearing your fanciest moonlight, and be ready to dance. If Titania herself were to commission a book, it would be this one.”
—Fran Wilde, two-time Nebula Award-winning author of Updraft and Riverland

Cover art and design by Brett Massé.

A young human painter and an ageless gentry queen fall in love over spilled wine—at the risk of his life and her immortality. Pulled into the Veil Between Worlds, two feuding neighbors (and a living statue) get swept up in a brutal war of succession. An investigative reporter infiltrates the Seafall City Laundries to write the exposé of a lifetime, and uncovers secrets she never believed possible. Returning to an oak grove to scatter her husband’s ashes, an elderly widow meets an otherworldly friend, who offers her a momentous choice. Two gentry queens of the Valwode plot to hijack a human rocketship and steal the moon out of the sky.

Dark Breakers gathers three new and two previously uncollected tales from World Fantasy Award-winning writer C. S. E. Cooney that expand on the thrice-enfolded worlds first introduced in her Locus and World Fantasy award-nominated novella Desdemona and the Deep. In her introduction to Dark Breakers, Crawford Award-winning author Sharon Shinn advises those who pick up this book to “settle in for a fantastical read” full of “vivid world-building, with layer upon layer of detail; prose so dense and gorgeous you can scoop up the words like handfuls of jewels; a mischievous sense of humor; and a warm and hopeful heart.”

“C. S. E. Cooney’s prose is like a cake baked by the fairies—beautifully layered, rich and precise, so delicious that it should be devoured with a silver fork. Since you can’t eat Dark Breakers, I suggest you read it slowly, savoring every slice. And if it gives you strange dreams—well, what did you expect of fairy cake?”
—Theodora Goss, World Fantasy and Mythopoeic Award-winning author of The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series

“Dark Breakers is a magnificent parure of novellas and matched stories, a suite of jewelled and velvet tales, delicately linked and ferociously glittering. A baroquely intense confection with a core of typewriters and coal fortunes, Dark Breakers is compounded of voluptuous invention and ferocious structural loves—for new romances and old friends, for the works of hands, for mortality and its gifts, and all the possibilities of worlds bleeding, weeping, wandering into each other’s arms.”
—Kathleen Jennings, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Flyaway

“Few people create worlds as lavish and sensual as those that spring from Cooney’s effervescent imagination. Her writing isn’t so much inspirational, but inspiration itself: gentry-magic spun into pages and paragraphs of glittering, fizzing, jaw-dropping beauty.”
—Cassandra Khaw, British Fantasy Award-nominated author of The All-Consuming World

“C. S. E. Cooney is one of the most moving, daring, and plainly beautiful voices to come out of recent fantasy. She’s a powerhouse with a wink in her eye and a song in each pocket.”
—Catherynne M. Valente, New York Times-bestselling author of Space Opera

“C. S. E. Cooney’s imagination is wild and varied, her stories bawdy, horrific, comic, and moving—frequently all at the same time. Her characters are wickedly appealing, and her language—O! her language. Lush, playful, poetic, but never obscure or stilted, it makes her magic more magic, her comedy more comic, and her tragic moments almost unbearable.”
—Delia Sherman, author of The Evil Wizard Smallbone

“Stunningly delicious! Cruel, beautiful and irresistible are C.S.E. Cooney’s characters and prose.”
—Ellen Kushner, author of Swordspoint

“C. S. E. Cooney is a master piper, playing songs within songs. Her stories are wild, theatrical, full of music and murder and magic.”
—James Enge, author of Blood of Ambrose

“Cooney drafts lyrical prose that sparkles with brilliant imagery.”
—Howard Andrew Jones, author of The Ring-Sworn Trilogy

“Newcomers will find Cooney’s glittering narrative skills and vivid worldbuilding addictive, her diverse characters intriguing, and her message of justice and freedom stirring.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Cooney produces memorable prose propelled by extraordinary ideas … Faced with such twisted genius, I’ll say no more!”
—Locus