Have you ever fallen into a story? It used to happen to me a lot when I was younger, when I was first reading, and there were still plots and characters awaiting discovery by a mind eager to escape from its own reality. As I grew older, my reasons for reading never changed; the desire to be carried away into worlds other than my own remained strong if for different reasons, but the more I read it seemed the harder it became for books to work their magic.

There was a time when I began to feel there might only be a finite number of stories told, for it started to feel like I was only ever reading variations on stories that I had already read. No matter the genre or the author, the patterns of the plots and the character types were all ones I was already familiar with. What made it even worse was that the more I read, the worse the stories appeared to become, as if the authors were merely writing pale imitations of the story I wanted to read.

It seemed like I was constantly finding stories that languished between covers awaiting passive readers who wanted nothing more than to be spoon fed the same tale over and over again. Thankfully something changed, whether it was me looking farther afield, writers opening up new territories, publishers willing to take the risk on something different, or a combination of all three I'm not certain, but in the last six or seven years I've been able to recapture the excitement of being a new reader again.

It seems like a whole new generation of writers have appeared to take up the challenge of capturing our imaginations: Erikson, Gaiman, Banker, Barclay, Kay and Kerr are just a few of the many names breathing new life into what was becoming a moribund art form. Even more exciting is the fact that hardly a month or two passes when there isn't a new author putting his or her vision down on paper. One who I've just stumbled upon is Robert V. S. Redick, whose latest book, The Red Wolf Conspiracy (book one of The Chathrand Voyage Trilogy) is published by Orion Gollancz and distributed in Canada by McArthur & Company

In the Red Wolf Conspiracy it appears that Redick was inspired by the great sea faring stories of the past, when men sailed the oceans through the grace of the wind and the strength of their sails; he added dollops of magic and political intrigue to create a book that draws you in from almost its opening words. With characters drawn from all levels of society, human and otherwise, he has populated the pages with the many faces of good and evil.