Stone & Sky

Imagine a wall the size of a world …

Caught in the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, Victorian adventurer Jonah Lightfoot is catapulted to the vertiginous world of Stone. Here he is pitted against Archan, an immortal dragon who has lain imprisoned for a million years with hatred growing inside her … and is now free.

Embarking on a desperate odyssey across this strange vertical landscape, Jonah meets new companions, magic and more besides. For Stone is more than just a fantastic realm – inside its mighty wall lies the key to the past, present and future of the entire human race.

Jonah’s story continues in Stone & Sea

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• “Graham Edwards has a strong and sometimes bizarre imagination, which he deftly combines with a gift for crafting thrilling action and suspense sequences, topping everything with a dash of humour and an undercurrent of teasing romance” – Amazon
• “An imaginative tour-de-force, quality writing … a superior work of fantasy” – SFX
• “Polished and inventive” – LineOne

The story behind Stone & Sky

Stone & Sky – originally published by HarperCollins in 1999 and reissued as a new edition in 2022 – represents the convergence of several trains of thought. While tinkering with a manuscript about memory, I happened to dig out an abandoned project about a journey along an infinite wall called simply The Wall. These two ideas went into a blender together with a long-held desire to write a parallel world story along the lines of the many SF classics I’d worked my way through as a youngster – Ringworld, Orbitsville, Riverworld, all those novels about people exploring Big Dumb Objects.

What came out of the blender was the wall-world of Stone.

As the ideas crystallised, they started connecting with my earlier novels. In the Dragoncharm books, for example, I’d explored the idea of a critical moment in our history where the world turned and all the magic went away. Now I wanted to zoom out from that picture, to imagine the Turnings that came before and after that moment. What sort of world existed before even the world of charm? And what of the Turnings to come?

So I designed Stone to be not just a giant wall, but a also a storehouse of memory. A sort of index of all possible histories, both mythical and real. When Jonah Lightfoot travels along Stone’s many ledges, he’s moving not just through space but time as well.

If you think all that just sounds like an excuse for a writer to throw as much into the melting pot as he possibly can, maybe you’re right. All I know is, once I’d assembled all the ingredients, cooking up the final dish was an absolute blast.