None of us became monks to be nursemaids.' Never cried, never once, and that was unnatural, but we liked you for it fine. 'Thought sure you'd die, but you ate and you slept and your color came normal in time. 'Gray as rain, you were,' Brother Argos said. Some were old enough to know their names at least, but Lazlo was just a baby, and an ill one, no less. They arrived like shipments of lambs, to hear the monks tell it, and with no more knowledge of their provenance than lambs, either. So many died that the tumbrils used to cart thieves to the gallows were repurposed to carry orphans to the monasteries and convents. Bands of displaced peasants roamed the razed countryside, fighting the crows for gleanings. The war, of course, did not content itself with soldiers. That was the year Zosma sank to its knees and bled great gouts of men into a war about nothing. I had to name so many babies that year I went with whatever popped into my head.' He added, as an afterthought, 'Didn't think you'd live anyway.' 'He was an eerie silent man, and you were an eerie silent babe, so it came to me: Lazlo. 'He had it cut out on a prison galley,' Brother Argos told him when he was old enough to understand. All he had were Lazlo and Strange- Strange because that was the surname given to all foundlings in the Kingdom of Zosma, and Lazlo after a monk's tongueless uncle. He liked to think so, but he had no idea.

Maybe it had been given to him by someone who loved him. Maybe it had been an old family name, burnished by generations of use. He'd had another name first, but it had died like a song with no one left to sing it.

No one knew that better than Lazlo Strange. Fall into a mythical world of dread and wonder, moths and nightmares, love and carnage. In this sweeping and breathtaking novel by National Book Award finalist Laini Taylor, author of the New York Times bestselling Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy, the shadow of the past is as real as the ghosts who haunt the citadel of murdered gods. What happened in Weep two hundred years ago to cut it off from the rest of the world? And who is the blue-skinned goddess who appears in Lazlo's dreams? Then a stunning opportunity presents itself, in the form of a hero called the Godslayer and a band of legendary warriors, and he has to seize his chance or lose his dream forever. Since he was just five years old, he's been obsessed with the mythic lost city of Weep, but it would take someone bolder than he to cross half the world in search of it. The dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around–and Lazlo Strange, war orphan and junior librarian, has always feared his dream chose poorly.

From National Book Award finalist Laini Taylor comes an epic fantasy about a mythic lost city and its dark past.

Strange the dreamer