Grave Empire

September 1, 2024

Swan launches a new fantasy series set in the world of his "Empire of the Wolf" trilogy. The Empire intends to become the most powerful kingdom in the known world. However, a mysterious plague, a failing proxy war, and an ancient prophecy portending supernatural catastrophe threaten its dominance. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from December 2, 2024
Swan launches the Great Silence trilogy, set 200 years after the Empire of the Wolf series, with this dazzling and immersive epic fantasy. After Peter Kleist’s father buys him a Sovan Army commission, the callow officer confronts more than he bargained for at the so-called “fort at the end of the world,” located near the Sovan Empire’s front with its enemies, Casimir and Sanque. In addition to those adversaries, the Sovans stationed there are at risk from some possibly supernatural creatures, responsible for the grisly massacre of several soldiers. As Kleist struggles to survive, Sovan diplomat Renata Rainer joins an expedition investigating an unsettling claim made by two monks from a sect that regularly converses with the dead. They claim that the spirits have gone quiet, which may herald the Great Silence, a prophesied apocalyptic event. The pages fly as Swan alternates between the two plotlines, building the stakes of each sky-high. The worldbuilding is lush, enhanced by Swan’s rich descriptive prose, and the characters are complex. Readers won’t need to be familiar with the earlier series to be drawn in—and this promising start will leave them eager for more.

December 10, 2024
In Grave Empire, Richard Swan returns to the world of his Empire of the Wolf fantasy trilogy in a way that’s thrilling and wholly unexpected. Set two hundred years after the events of the original series, this new story shifts to a world of muskets, cannons and terrifyingly gruesome magic. Unlike its predecessor, Grave Empire employs a third-person perspective with three points of view: a protagonist, an antagonist and a character who’s still a mystery. Renata, a junior diplomat, works in a department tasked with communicating with the Stygion, elusive mermen who want nothing to do with air breathers. Count Lamprecht von Oldenberg is a noble with dubious morals, involved in everything from smuggling to illegal dark magics. And Peter Kleist is a young officer who is unexpectedly posted to the wild frontiers rather than the cushy billet he had expected. When the necromancers report a great silence in the afterlife, it sets off a chain of events that affects all three characters. One will seek answers, one will see an opportunity, and one will have to endure the unendurable. Grave Empire is a masterful grimdark fantasy that stands among the best in the genre and blends elements of Swan’s previous works, while crafting a narrative that is an excellent entry point for new readers. Fans of Joe Abercrombie and Brian McClellan will find much to love in Grave Empire, a dark, gripping tale of ambition, survival and the haunting echoes of death.

January 1, 2025
The empire presented in this first installment in Swan's (The Trials of Empire, 2024) new series is vast and greedy. This complex world is full of mermen, wolfmen, and monks who talk to the dead. Peter, a soldier stationed at the edges of the empire, and idealistic Renata, an activist working to further the rights of the mermen she has never met, are just two of the characters pulled into a quest when the monks come forward saying that they are unable to hear the voices of the dead anymore, which is the start of a sacred prophecy. There is nothing new in sf and fantasy in an empire that is getting too big or reaching too far, but what will be endlessly fascinating to readers is watching the political and social dynamics play out on the page. Change is slow and complicated, reflected in the pleasant cadence of Swan's language. All of the elements are here for this to be a series that will draw in epic-fantasy fans.

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