From an award-winning author comes a powerful new epic fantasy. When the age of spellcasting ends, the greatest of kingdoms will fall . . . A clever idea for a fantasy novel: In a mediaeval Europe where a kingdom uses magic to win every battle, not to mention run the plumbing, the maic suddenly fails. The panic this causes makes heroes and villains of ordinary folk and epic violence ensues, an interesting rumination on whether characters are born or moulded by circumstance. And the struggle to discover real technology is a heartening reminder of how well our species has done in the real world to build civilisation without so much as a hocus pocus