Read The Book – The Owl in the Labyrinth, June 5th 2025
Let’s get one thing out of the way first:
“We’re stuck in the middle of the Boiling Seas,” Tal said, “surrounded by soldiers, at the mercy of a tyrant and one of the most powerful magicians in the world. We’ve got no weapons, no friends, and no way out.”
“Exactly,” said Lily. “It’s going to be so much fun.”
Tal, Max and Lily might have sailed the deadly Boiling Seas, explored their mysterious islands, even flown through their steamy skies – but they’ve never ventured underneath them. Until now.
Because Max is trapped, surrounded by the very secrets she and her friends have been hunting – but while she unravels the mystery of the Scrolls, Tal and Lily are more concerned with getting her back alive.
It’s only a journey into the most inhospitable environment on the planet: an ocean of boiling water, floored with molten rock and filled with steel-scaled sea serpents. And it’s not like the most powerful man on the Seas is trying to seize their secrets for himself at the same time.
What could possibly go wrong?
I’ve spent the last few months getting this novel in order. I’ve formatted and reformatted and edited and tweaked. I’ve reached out to people with advance copies, I’ve posted promo, I’ve designed covers, I’ve uploaded manuscripts. And I looked, last week, at my drafts on KDP. I realised that, apart from publicity, I’d done just about everything. And then I looked at the calendar, and wondered why the 5th of June was ringing a bell.
Almost 6 years ago, on the 5th of June 2019, I released The Blackbird and the Ghost. And since the book was ready, and since I knew that I’d always be annoyed with myself if I missed the opportunity… I thought ‘what the hell’, and hit the pre-order button.
The Owl in the Labyrinth will be released on Thursday the 5th of June 2025.
And you can actually order it now, if you like, at least digitally: the pre-orders are entirely live and presumably working, given I’ve had to cancel multiple purchases of my own work while trying to copy the links. And unlike The Blackbird and the Ghost, the actual physical book will also release on the 5th. And, whoo boy. It’s a big one.
I am, as they say, in awe at the size of this lad. This absolute unit of a book is almost as long as The Blackbird and the Ghost and Nightingale’s Sword put together; it is bigger than two Blackbirds by a good margin. I knew that in terms of word count, obviously, but it’s another thing to actually see it. And hold it. I need a bigger bookshelf for my own work now. So if you want a Very Large Book then please: follow those links, and pre-order/wait until Thursday and get a copy.
‘But Hûw,’ I hear you cry, ‘I never actually read the first two books in the series!’ Then this piece of information will be very helpful: as of Wednesday the 4th, the ebooks of both The Blackbird and the Ghost and Nightingale’s Sword will be available for FREE. (Until Sunday the 8th.) This means you can have the entire Boiling Seas trilogy for the price of one book – and if you read fast enough, you can pick up books 1 and 2 on Wednesday and be finished in time to start The Owl in the Labyrinth by the time it actually comes out!
It’s a bit surreal, honestly. Obviously it’s not taken exactly 6 years to create this trilogy – it took a while to write Blackbird in the first place, after all – but for those of you, dear readers, who have actually read Blackbird and Nightingale it’s a nice bit of circularity. And I think back to who I was 6 years ago, and my mind boggles. Never mind who I was 9 years ago when I first started writing this series. The Hûw Steer of 2019 was barely out of university, still looking for a proper job, only recently in possession of a beard, even. 6 years on… and I still feel like I haven’t grown up, despite the fact that I’m married, that I have new friends, that I’ve travelled the world, that I’ve led a fair bit of life.
It feels particularly strange looking back at Tal Wenlock, 9 years after first writing him. I wrote him as a few years older than me; now he’s a few years younger. The journey I sent him on, and Max, and Lily, hasn’t been that long for them, for all that they’ve crammed an awful lot of adventure into it. But it has for me. I love this trio dearly. I love writing them. I hope that some of you, and some of the rest of the world, might enjoy reading them. I think that’s why I write, really: so I can share these worlds and words I love with other people. I tell stories. If you’ve ever listened, thank you.
So yeah. In summation: free books Wednesday, new book Thursday. Buy it. Read it. Enjoy it.
