Winter’s Dreams

Best known for his Black Company series of fantasy novels, Cook focuses on alternate realities, distant futures, self-sacrifice, and camaraderie born of loneliness in these 12 intimate stories. A black family is destroyed by racial hatred in “Song from a Forgotten Hill.” Diffident, conflicted antiheroes pay the ultimate price for comrades and causes in the six interconnected space-faring narratives of “And Dragons in the Sky,” “In the Wind,” “The Recruiter,” “Quiet Sea,” “Darkwar,” and “Enemy Territory.” An immortal must watch the death of the last city in “Sunrise.” A comic misadventure reverses the protagonist’s success in “The Seventh Fool.” A sword-wielding mercenary seeks the forgotten land of Moon in “The Devil’s Tooth.” And the concluding title story leaves the reader wondering if the preceding stories are but stolen dreams. Close first-person perspectives tug heartstrings in these tragedies of thwarted expectations. Agent: Gray Tan, the Grayhawk Agency. (May)