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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 the mortal halfbreeds born where the fae and human worlds collide, never able to fully belong to either, outsiders from birth.
October Daye knows too well 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 from there.
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 four books in the series are available now: Rosemary and Rue, A Local Habitation, An Artificial Night, and Late Eclipses. One Salt Sea will follow in 2011, Ashes of Honor in 2012, and The Chimes at Midnight in 2013.
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 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 2012, DAW). Details to come.
The Chimes at Midnight (September 2013, DAW). Details to come.
SHORT FICTION
"Through This House," published in Home Improvement: Undead Edition (August 2011). This story takes place between Late Eclipses and One Salt Sea, and features Toby, May, Danny, and Quentin as they make their first entrance into the reopened knowe of Goldengreen.
GRAPHICS AND GOODIES
You can download promotional icons and wallpapers for all four of Toby's published adventures, as well as special icons and wallpapers for the German editions of the first two books. More goodies are coming, so check back often!
Watch this space for additional news.