Django Wexler is one of the preeminent authors of the flintlock fantasy genre, having won accolades for his magic-and-guns series The Shadow Campaigns. After a foray into young adult fantasy with his last two books, he’s jumping back into adult epic fantasy with both feet in Ashes of the Sun, the first volume of a new trilogy unconnected to any of his earlier works.

Details are scarce at this point—the book arrives in Summer 2020 from Orbit—but we’ve been given this tantalizing logline to share with you:

Long ago, a magical war destroyed an empire, and a new one was built in its ashes. But still the old grudges simmer, and two siblings will fight on opposite sides to save their world, in the start of Django Wexler’s new epic fantasy trilogy.

And more than that, Orbit has also given us the go-ahead to share the cover, which features art by Scott M. Fischer…

We asked Django to spill a bit more on the book and the art that adorns it.

“For me the thing I love most about this cover—apart from it simply being gorgeous; Scott M. Fischer did an amazing job—is how it captures the tone of the setting,” he said. “I describe Ashes of the Sun as a ‘post-fantasy apocalypse,’ where a high-fantasy civilization has come crashing down in the relatively recent past. This isn’t a world where the remnants of the ancients are confined to buried temples and forgotten woods—they’re everywhere: vast ruined cities, crashed skyships, and smoking craters still littering the landscape, with the people of the present day living and scavenging amid the wreckage. The cover, I think, does a great job of capturing that feeling of ruined grandeur.

It certainly has piqued our interest. Ashes of the Sun arrives next summer, and we can’t wait to learn more about it…