Seanan McGuire - October Daye 1-8 and 4.5

WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Faerie has always been with us. The fairy tales, ballads, and folklore of the mortal world are only shadows of the true, sometimes terrible reality of the fae. They survive in secrecy, keeping their Courts in the places where the light doesn’t fall, existing in parallel to the world we know. They aren’t human. They don’t want to be. But sometimes they take human lovers, and sometimes, those unions are fertile ones. Changelings aren’t stolen children; they’re mortal halfbreeds born where the fae and human worlds collide, never able to fully belong to either, outsiders from birth.

October Daye knows how cruel Faerie can be to its changeling children. Born in San Francisco and carried to the Summerlands by her pureblood mother when she was just a child, she was raised in a world that never seemed capable of understanding her. She ran away the moment the opportunity presented itself, only to find that the human world wasn’t any better.

Things have been going downhill ever since.

The October Daye books follow the adventures of October “Toby” Daye as she tries to find her footing in a world that seems a little more interested in killing her than she’d like. The first eight books in the series are available now: Rosemary and Rue, A Local Habitation, An Artificial Night, Late Eclipses, One Salt Sea, Ashes of Honor, Chimes at Midnight, and The Winter Long.

A Red-Rose Chain will be released in 2015, Once Broken Faith in 2016, and The Brightest Fell in 2017.

The October Daye series is published in North America by DAW Books, with cover art by Christian McGrath and interior dingbats by Tara O’Shea. For more details on Toby’s world, and for answers to your specific questions, please see the Toby Daye FAQ page.
INDIVIDUAL BOOKS

Rosemary and Rue (September 1st 2009, DAW) introduces us to October Daye, a fae half-breed, former street kid, and self-exiled knight-errant from the Duchy of Shadowed Hills. Her friends—the few friends she has left—call her Toby. After getting burned by both sides of her heritage, she’s retreated entirely from the fae community, spending her nights stocking shelves at a San Francisco grocery store and her days asleep in her apartment downtown. It takes two to really make an exile work, and when Countess Evening Winterrose is murdered, Toby finds herself yanked abruptly back into the world she thought she was leaving behind. It’s going to take everything she’s got just to stay alive, and the stakes are higher than anyone has guessed…

A Local Habitation (March 2nd 2010, DAW) finds Toby still reeling from her return to fae society when her liege lord, Duke Sylvester Torquill, comes to her with a request she can’t deny. His niece, January, lives in a nearby fiefdom called Tamed Lightning, and has stopped checking in. Taking Quentin, a teenage Daoine Sidhe courtier from Shadowed Hills, Toby heads for Tamed Lightning on what looks like a simple baby-sitting run on the surface, but underneath, has the potential to turn dangerous for everyone involved…

An Artificial Night (September 7th 2010, DAW) brings Toby into unavoidable, disastrous contact with the darker realities of the fae as Blind Michael, Firstborn son of Oberon and Maeve, begins claiming the children of the Mists as his own…including several that Toby considers to be essentially family. Time is short and the rules are stranger than any she’s ever played by, dictated by a mad Firstborn and his private army, but failure isn’t an option. If she can’t get there and back by the light of a candle, she may not get back at all…

Late Eclipses (March 1st 2011, DAW) finds Toby still reeling from her encounter with Blind Michael, but beginning, gradually, to recover…a recovery that is endangered when an old enemy makes an unexpected appearance. Has Oleander de Merelands returned to San Francisco? If so, why? And what part does the Queen of the Mists have to play in all of this? With the stakes getting higher by the hour, Toby must finally find a way to sort truth from lies, and learn more about her place in Faerie than she ever dreamed…

One Salt Sea (September 6th 2011, DAW) begins as Toby is getting her feet under herself in the wake of Oleander’s return. She’s running her county, getting a grip on the management of her knowe, and heading for a world of trouble as the sudden threat of war with the local Undersea looms. Can she find the missing sons of the Duke and Duchess of Saltmist before people start dying? Or is it already too late? The fight is more personal than it’s ever been before, and not everyone will be standing when the tide rolls out…

Ashes of Honor (September 4th 2012, DAW) picks up in the aftermath of the conflict with the Undersea. Toby’s life has changed forever, and she’s still trying to figure out how she’s going to deal with what she can’t deny. But when an old friend encounters an unexpected problem, she can’t allow her grief to interfere with her job—and maybe more importantly, she can’t allow her inaction to endanger Faerie. Doors that were never meant to open are being unlocked, and roads long abandoned are being used once more. It’s a race for the life of a little girl, and there can only be one winner…

Chimes at Midnight (September 3rd 2013, DAW) finds Toby trying to deal with the goblin fruit problem in San Francisco—a problem that turns quickly personal when changelings start showing up dead. What’s more, the Queen of the Mists seems bent on making things harder than they have to be, and her interference may be enough to get Toby killed, or worse. With time running out and enemies at every side, it seems like there’s nothing that can’t be risked, or lost, in the fight to make it out alive…

The Winter Long (September 2nd 2014, DAW) sees questions answered, answers questioned, and old debts finally put to rest. There is more to lose than there has ever been before, and whatever comes next, it will not come easy.