Back in November, just as I was starting to get my reading back on track, I was looking through my bookshelves and noticing the anniversary edition of the Farseer trilogy, I started wondering if there was one for Liveship Traders. There wasn’t but this triggered me finding out that there were a lot of special editions of so many books these days. One such page showed a Waterstones edition, so I naturally went to the Waterstones website and did a search for “beautiful books” 😆.

What resulted was seeing several new releases due out in Jan/Feb where Waterstones were releasing a special edition. Being in the frame of mind I was in during November, the only thing for me to do was to spend a few hours reading through the blurbs for these books and deciding if there were any I wanted. There were two: Godkiller by Hannah Kaner and The Cloisters by Katy Hays. I hadn’t heard anything about these books at the time, I just knew that I wanted to get them. Both because they sounded interesting, and that the books themselves were beautiful.

Unfortunately, my books got caught in the the crash of Royal Mail’s international shipping system. But thankfully, they finally arrived this weekend.

And they were just as beautiful as expected. Though, given Godkiller is Fantasy, I had expected it to be a bit thicker than it is. Hopefully the story is a good one, as I’d like to keep this book. Check out the edges:

And the end papers.

And the artwork that wraps around the entire dust jacket.

Kissen’s family were killed by zealots of a fire god. Now she makes a living killing gods, and enjoys it. That is, until she finds a god she cannot kill: Skedi, a god of white lies, has somehow bound himself to a young noble, and they are both on the run from unknown assassins.

Joined by a disillusioned knight on a secret quest, they must travel to the ruined city of Blenraden, where the last of the wild gods reside, to each beg a favour.

Pursued by demons, and in the midst of burgeoning civil war, they will all face a reckoning – something is rotting at the heart of the kingdom, and only they can be the ones to stop it.

The Cloisters isn’t quite so impressive, but does have sprayed and stencilled edges.

And sounds more intriguing than Godkiller.

When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York, she hopes to spend the summer working at the city’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead she is assigned to the Cloisters, the Met’s Gothic museum and garden renowned for its medieval and Renaissance collections.

There she is drawn into a small circle of charismatic but enigmatic researchers, each with their own secrets and desires, including the museum’s curator, Patrick Roland, whose obsession is tarot and the possibility of divination. Eager for the approval of her new colleagues, Ann is only too happy to indulge some of their more outlandish theories.

But then she discovers a mysterious, once-believed lost deck of fifteenth-century Italian tarot cards and finds herself at the centre of a dangerous game of toxic friendship and unbridled ambition. And as the game being played within the Cloisters begins to spiral out of control, Ann must decide whether she is truly able to defy the cards and shape her own future.

Shipping from UK to New Zealand is quite pricey though, so to spread it out so that the individual cost per book was a bit more palatable, I found two additional books to preorder. Neither of these were special editions, I just used my normal criteria of title/cover that catches my eye and one that sounded interesting.

First pick was Now She is Witch by Kirsty Logan. Talk about great covers!

She dug her mother’s grave in the poison garden so it would stay hidden…

Lux has lost everything when Else finds her, alone in the woods. Her mother, her lover, her home – all burned. The world is suspicious of women like her, but Lux is cunning; she knows how to exploit people’s expectations, how to blend into the background. And she knows a lot about poisons.

Else has not found Lux by accident. She needs her help to seek revenge against the man who wronged her. Together they pursue him north. But on their hunt they will uncover dark secrets that entangle them with dangerous adversaries.

From the snowy winter woods to the bright midnight sun, from lost and powerless to finding your path: Now She is Witch conjures a world of violence and beauty – a world where women grasp at power through witchcraft, sexuality and performance, and most of all through throwing each other to the wolves.

The last selection, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett, has a very boring appearance in comparison to the above three. But I have her Twyford Code on my bookshelf (ok yes, unread), and the premise of this book sounded interesting. More so than others that I could have selected to be book four.

Everyone knows the sad story of the Alperton Angels: the cult who brainwashed a teenage girl and convinced her that her newborn baby was the anti-Christ. Believing hey had a divine mission to kill the infant, they were only stopped when the girl came to her senses and called the police. The Angels committed suicide rather than stand trial, while the mother and baby disappeared into the care system.

Nearly two decades later, true-crime author Amanda Bailey is writing a book on the Angels. The Alperton baby has turned eighteen and can finally be interviewed; if Amanda can find them, it will be the true-crime scoop of the year, and will save her flagging career. But rival author Oliver Menzies is just as smart and better connected, and is also on the baby’s trail.

As Amanda and Oliver are forced to collaborate, they realise that what everyone thinks they know about the Angels is wrong. The truth is something much darker and stranger than they’d ever imagined. And the story of the Alperton Angels is far from over.

Without the Royal Mail attack, these books would have arrived around the same time, if not before, they started appearing in the shops here. It’s been hard seeing them and knowing my copies are stuck somewhere on their way to me. Of course, it’s not like I had time to read them before now. But I do want to try to get to at least two of them within the next couple of months. One of them should probably be one of the beautiful books – after all, that was the purpose of this order.