Two books worth your attention this week.
A Tale of Tales, by David Farland (The Runelords, Book 9)
David Farland died in January 2022, while at work on the ninth and final Runelords novel. A Tale of Tales reaches readers on August 30, nearly seventeen years after the previous entry in the series and more than four years after its author's death. This is a different kind of publishing story than most new-release coverage: a nine-book epic fantasy saga, running since 1998, arriving at its intended ending rather than being left permanently unfinished. For any reader who has committed years to a long series and knows the specific dread of an author's death arriving before the last book, this is one of the better outcomes that can happen.
The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood, by H.G. Parry
A dual-timeline novel moving between Wales in 1941 and the fall of Camelot, built around the premise that the Lady of the Lake engineered the end of the Round Table herself. Parry works at genuine epic scale here, an entire mythology under reconstruction, while keeping the emotional register personal and specific rather than abstracted into a generic apocalypse. It has drawn strong reviews as one of the more distinctive Arthurian retellings in recent years. Out now from Redhook.
One of these is about finishing what you started, against real odds. The other is about how much weight a single myth can carry when it is rebuilt with care instead of shortcuts.
Map's Edge Media publishes The Hearthlight Cycle as a series meant to be finished, all seven books, on the timeline it takes to do it properly.