This fantasy, space opera epic unleashes a mind-warping tale of galactic intrigue, explosive action, incandescent dialogue and smouldering passions. It will be a chase across the known galaxy, through broken worlds and the palaces of their psychotic warlords, to the very edge of sanity and into the heart of the universe’s greatest enigma: those silent beasts of the void, the Scalpels. Swirl Savard’s life is not going to plan. Exiled by her alien masters to the scuzziest part of the galaxy for crimes she can’t be sure she was complicit in, the once promising combat agent has been reduced to peddling strange drugs aboard a mile-long space slum. If there is an upside, Swirl’s can be sure her sister isn’t part of it. Sparkle Savard is louche, frivolous and- worst of all- shares the same brain and body as Swirl. But when mysterious killers attack, the two head-sisters must learn to stop bickering and flee for their lives. Hargie Stukes’ life never really had a plan. He prefers it that way. One of the bubblefolk, a race of faster-than-light addicted lowlifes, Hargie jumps from star to star, bar to bar, forever outrunning a past best forgotten. When a woman with a fluctuating persona buys a ride in his ship, Hargie tries to see it as just another job. But some jobs you can’t walk away from, not if you want to stay alive. Melid of Silvercloud’s life is but a tiny component in one immense organisation. Empathically bonded to her own kind, she feels absolutely nothing for the rest of humanity. Melid is ordered to hunt down a mysterious woman before she can return to her even more mysterious home world. Mercy won’t come into it.

The galaxy sleepwalks toward war, blind to the hidden fleets between the stars. Only a handful of individuals have the remotest chance of saving a thousand worlds from the flames. Trouble is, they’ve their own damn problems. Swirl and Sparkle are inconvenienced. Sharing the same body since birth, the sisters now find themselves confined to an asteroid full of mind-linked psychopaths. Swirl and Sparkle must escape, find their lost body-sibling and seize an unimaginable destiny. Yet that is a path that will only lead them to their greatest terror: loneliness. Hargie Stukes never asked for the mess he’s in. He’d been happy alone among the stars, but a strange woman he’d met complicated things, the kind of complicated Hargie can’t get enough of. The kind that kills. But sticking close to her will mean a trip right through the one place Hargie had hoped never to see again: home. Melid of Silvercloud has performed every duty required of her, no matter the ethics. Now, with her entire childhood shown to be a lie, Melid finds she must walk a line between the hive-mind that raised her and a new possibility both tantalising and horrific: individuality. Four people, four fates, each inextricably bound to a mysterious destiny that awaits upon Zahrir, a planet half in our universe, half somewhere else entirely. Beyond reality’s threshold loom alien gods of unimaginable power and nameless intention. Masters of dream, keepers of the galaxy’s subconscious, you can be sure we are all playthings of The Delighted.