Stone & Sky

Stone & Sky by Graham Edwards is a story about a wall – a wall the size of a world.

Victorian naturalist Jonah Lightfoot, along with his American companion Annie West, is catapulted to the wall-world of Stone following the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. In this strange, vertical realm, Jonah faces an immortal dragon who has lain imprisoned for a million years, hatred growing inside her. Her name is Archan, and she is free at last. And she’s mad as hell.

But Stone’s precipitous landscape holds more than just magic – it holds memory too. As he journeys through human history and ancient myth, Jonah learns that on Stone the future is rarely certain. More disturbingly, the same applies to the past.

Jonah’s story continues in Stone & Sea

• “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

Read an extract from Stone & Sky

The story behind Stone & Sky

Stone & Sky 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.