Today on the site, we’re revealing the cover for the second book in the Heretic’s Guide to Homecoming series, namely The Heretic’s Guide to Homecoming, Book Two: Practice by Sienna Tristen, which releases on October 22nd from the Shale Project! The book features an asexual genderqueer narrator, a queerplatonic partnership, and diverse case, and you can get more info on the first book here. Now read on to see where the story continues!

“All good theory stands up to the test of practice.”

Freshly risen from the underworld of his insecurities, Ronoah Genoveffa Elizzi-denna Pilanovani is halfway through his journey to the fabled Pilgrim State. But the world this side of the Iphigene Sea is not an easy one: violence and subterfuge litter the way forward, and something meaner stalks the edges of Ronoah’s certainty, something that threatens to turn the very reason for his pilgrimage to dust.

To survive, he will have to be clever and kind in equal measure. To ask for help from the acrobats and queens-to-be and foreigners’ gods that cross his path. To confront that beguiling, bewildering companion he travels with, the one whose secrets are so vast and unforgivable. He will have to draw on every story he knows in order to make it to the Pilgrim State with his soft heart intact—and then make it home again.

Mythic and multilayered, the final installment of the Heretic’s Guide to Homecoming duology is a love letter to losing and regaining faith in the world and the way you move through it.

And there’s the gorgeous cover, designed and illustrated by Haley Rose!

Preorder: Books2Read

Sienna Tristen is an author, poet, and literary organizer living in Treaty 3 territory who explores queer platonic partnership, the nonhuman world, and mythmaking in their work. The first installment of their award-winning fantasy duology The Heretic’s Guide to Homecoming came out from indie arts collective The Shale Project in 2018; you can find their poetry in Augur Magazine and Plenitude, and their chapbook hortus animarum: a new herbal for the queer heart is forthcoming from Frog Hollow Press. When the sun is up, they work with The Word On The Street Toronto to showcase the coolest Canadian & Indigenous literature.