SF/F: Alchemy of Glass by Barbara Barnett

Alchemy of Glass, the sequel to Barbara Barnett’s Bram Stoker Award-nominated The Apothecary’s Curse, connects an epidemic in 1826 London, the fatal disease of a young girl in modern Chicago, and an ancient ruined monastery. These three things converge to threaten a catastrophic future.

In the catacombs of the monastery, hidden away in the Eildon Hills of Scotland, a land of myth and mystery—the place where immortal apothecary Gaelan Erceldoune found sanctuary as a lad—Gaelan discovers a journal, apparently written by his old friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, chronicling an adventure into the Otherworld, a land of fairy castles and filigree trees hung with Spanish moss.

A small piece of glass falls from the journal’s pages. Gaelan recognizes it as a fragment long missing from a stained glass panel he’d created a century earlier. When the opalescent glass seems to come alive in his hand, Gaelan is suddenly thrust into a nightmarish, strange world far from the fantastical dreamscape Conan Doyle describes.

Alchemy of Glass weaves a magical tale drawing upon cutting edge science and the most ancient of Celtic mythology and intertwining the magic of fairy lore and the harsh reality of difficult choices, returning us to the world of Gaelan Erceldoune as his past, present and future collide. ◊

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