A kingdom in danger. A prophecy that could change everything. The closing lines of a farewell poem, written centuries ago by the last great king of the old world, might prove to be more than it seems:

The world and all its light shall fade;
I’ll stay with her beneath the shade
And wait until the world’s remade…

Something is creeping at the fringes of the world. Is it just the talk of frightened villagers? Or is it something more? Join us in this entirely new fantasy world. The Banished Lands combines the best of epic fantasy, fairy tale, mythology, poetry, romance and mystery. If you love a good old-fashioned story, The Banished Lands will deliver on your expectations.

A mysterious fog blankets the forest just outside the town of Suriya. A dark plot unfolds as Durian and his friends discover ties between a strange wanderer and the warlike barbarian kingdom far to the north. Are the mysterious things happening in the forest a prelude to invasion? What happens next will propel Durian and his friends into the middle of an unsolved riddle a dozen centuries in the making. This book is safe for kids of all ages.

I’ve always loved that enthralling feeling of adventure and mystery that comes when you dive into a brand new world. My greatest motivation for The Banished Lands was to create a world of rich lore and history, but not overburden the reader with backstory. In The Banished Lands series, we enter a fractured world with a forgotten history. But hints of it remain through a set of poems that speak of the old world and cryptic events which brought an end to that age.

I love the idea of characters living normal, mundane lives, suddenly thrust into an ancient struggle they didn’t even know was raging. I love the fantasy genre because it isn’t ashamed of the classic archetypes – the epic struggle of good and evil, heroics, and everything that often gets the label cliché. Using these archetypes in ways that haven’t been done before was my real motivation for writing The Banished Lands series. The way this series combines poetry, lore and mystery is something unique in the fantasy genre.

When writing this first book, I often sat back and wondered to myself, What would it be like to live in a world with a shrouded past? We often take modern life for granted – the whole wealth of human knowledge at our fingertips. But what would it be like to live in a world where the only history was cryptic poetry telling of a time when the world was a wildly different place? And what if, somehow, those ancient poems that no one really understands seem to be the only thing that really explains the dark things creeping forward from the fringes of the world? Welcome to The Banished Lands!