Sister Wake
On sale
15th January 2026
Price: £24.99
Genre
A proud culture oppressed for centuries. An island over-run by bestial gods. And a girl with the power to raise the fallen . . .
For three hundred years the wild island of Croí has been subject to the Empire of the Answering. Clans have been subjugated, their language outlawed, their religion reduced to the whisper of fugitive priests.
Until Croí’s prayers are answered. The Gods return. Feral and majestic, they stride the land as colossi, throwing the Empire into chaos.
The dispossessed and the vengeful struggle for power. A ruthless priestess rallies the faithful, offering a simple choice – believe, or die – even as the empire’s Queen makes the first moves in a long and dangerous game.
But for all their machinations, one woman will decide the fate of them all . . . Sister Wake, unwilling saint of the Goddess of Death.
EditBuild
For three hundred years the wild island of Croí has been subject to the Empire of the Answering. Clans have been subjugated, their language outlawed, their religion reduced to the whisper of fugitive priests.
Until Croí’s prayers are answered. The Gods return. Feral and majestic, they stride the land as colossi, throwing the Empire into chaos.
The dispossessed and the vengeful struggle for power. A ruthless priestess rallies the faithful, offering a simple choice – believe, or die – even as the empire’s Queen makes the first moves in a long and dangerous game.
But for all their machinations, one woman will decide the fate of them all . . . Sister Wake, unwilling saint of the Goddess of Death.
EditBuild
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Reviews
Sister Wake is a brilliant, rebellious scream of a novel with 200 foot tall pissed off gods from Celtic mythology coming for an alternate British Empire in a fever dream of an Irish revenge fantasy. A page-turning epic about people doing monstrous deeds in a desperate bid to win the war between colonizer and colony, it mercilessly shows us that in the war for sovereignty and freedom there can be no saints, only those willing to sell their very souls for victory.
Sister Wake is the rare epic fantasy that hits on all levels - lushly descriptive, meticulously plotted, dizzyingly vast, and with characters that breathe and bleed with the sort of vigour that makes you look up from the page and wonder that they're not sitting right next to you
I absolutely loved its epic mix of weird horror and revolutionary intrigue. Heartily recommended
Two hundred-foot kaiju gods, necromancy, and anti-colonial rebellion - what more could you ask for? Dave Rudden's Sister Wake gripped me in its iron chains and carried me forward on prose as beautiful as it was riveting. I practically squealed each time he treated me to a description of his wonderfully grotesque gods
Sister Wake drags us into an uprising of furious pride and eldritch horror, where neither gods nor heroes can be trusted. An intricate reimagining of Irish history and mythology, chained together with beautiful prose and dark humour
Sister Wake is quite simply dazzling. The vastness of Rudden's rich world is breathtaking while his prose is vivid and exquisite. The words are alive, thrumming on the page and propelling us through this utterly compulsive story
A gorgeous work of power and magic, saints and monsters and gods. Don't wait another second: Sister Wake is like nothing you've ever read
Rudden has masterfully crafted a layered, epic world made all the more brutal by the return of gods terrifying and unknown
The worldbuilding is expansive, and there's a streak of horror in the primal, animalistic fear evoked by the sight of a towering, unknowable god
The worldbuilding is expansive, and there's a streak of horror in the primal, animalistic fear evoked by the sight of a towering, unknowable god
