A N D R I O N
now available wherever you buy books
⁜ knight errant press ⁜
I was five when my father killed the Spartan.
I was five when my father and his revolution took the city of Athens.
I was sixteen when, for all intents and purposes, my father tried to kill me.
order on:
knight errant press
amazon
When 16-year-old Kallis goes to see Aristophanes' latest play, she's inspired to sneak into the Assembly and try to make her name as an orator…
After overthrowing Athens and changing the course of the city’s future, her father raised her at his side. Even though the men around him treat her like a wild animal, Niko's always been proud of her outspoken intelligence. Kallis has no reason to suspect he'll be anything but supportive. She’s spent her whole life immersed in politics. Is it so unthinkable that she wants to follow in her father’s footsteps?
Andrion is a feminist and queer novella, centred upon the relationship between father and daughter: he who risked everything to give her a better life, and she who’s willing to risk it all again for the sake of a more equitable future.
Against the backdrop of steampunk antiquity – an Ancient Athens where automatons line the city walls – Kallis sets out to incite a revolution. She’s going to create a world where no one is forced to be someone they’re not: a world where women can be artificers and orators, where one’s future isn’t determined by the track set out by their parents.
Reviewers say…
“ANDRION is a beautifully complex mosaic of entangled lives and woven myths that reads like an epic poem modernized. It is devastatingly poetic and comments on gender politics as well as the complexity of familial dynamics in the face of society, agency, and duty. Alex Penland has crafted a mythic, alluring, and mesmerizing tale that commands attention and holds it suffocatingly tight—but you won’t mind how breathless it leaves you.”
- Ai Jiang, I Am Ai and Linghun
“Righteous anger shines in this story like a beacon. “
- Sue Burke, Seismosis Duology
Complex relationships, politics, and history come together like clockwork to form a beautiful and powerful whole.
- Jim C. Hines, author of Libriomancer