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Lien’s mission to rescue a friend is constantly interrupted by people who want him to be say a knight, or a king, or even dead.

Lien considered growing up in a haunted forest adopted by a shamanic tribe to be pretty exciting, but even that can’t prepare him for discovery by his own people.

For everyone seems to have a different idea of who he might – or should – be, though no-one’s interested in what he thinks about it or his own mission to find Arete, his missing honorary aunt: the only person who might actually know the truth.

It seems the poor boy might be heir to a dangerous throne – that’ll get him killed – though he might not be and that could get him killed too; he might have a glorious future as a knight, but that seems to upset a lot of people; he could be the Mandala, the avatar of Justice, which won’t get him killed, but pretty much wrecks his life from this point on; or he might just be a really ordinary kid, which will make a lot of rich, powerful and dangerous folk look pretty stupid.

Saddle up for a swashbuckling adventure across Altica, a splendid medieval world where the taller the story, the more likely it is to be true.

LIEN by Anne-Laure Daviet - http://www.mi-chemin.net/carnet

ARETE
Adventure comedy fantasy novels for teenagers and young adults

Hundreds of years have passed since the time of Lien, and Altica is a world becoming duller as it ages. True histories of a glorious past when gods walked the lands have been relegated to fantastical fiction by the ‘scientists’ of the day, and when even the likes of Arete are missing, presumed mythical, there seems little opposition to the relentless advance of spiritual monotheism and secular ‘progress’.

In modern Avenel, the greatest source of excitement, employment and premature violent death comes from the ongoing power-struggle between the warlord Dragon, now the bearer of the Sinless Sword, and the Magnus, an ancient organisation Lien reinvented with the best of intentions yet now has world domination on the agenda.

But the lives of Avenel’s mortals are still very much subject to the machinations of the angels, demons and Essene – some of who have also the linked world of Earth on their agenda this time around. Another celestial game of chess is underway, and the first pawn on the board is a simple housewife who is thrust into this new world of violence and politics in search of Arete. Having established that the immortal figure is in fact real, Kunata then has to try to keep her alive – a surprisingly difficult task given Arete’s suicidal attitude to life.

And that’s only the first step in a series of events that will see Arete and her new companions – the soon-to-be widowed Kunata, sociopath mercenary Stella, schizophrenic Linli (or Sailor, or Raven, depending on who’s in) and Lien’s great-great-something-grand daughter Dexte – forced to finish the battles that Lien and his contemporaries started centuries earlier.

Yet even as her friends help her find the strength to fight once more in defence of Attica, Arete finds herself losing the most important battle of all – the war within, which will determine whether she can regain the will to live.