The newest Mistborn book, Shadows of Self, is out. (In hardcover, ebook, and audio in the US and Canada; in the UK the ebook and audiobook come out on Thursday the 8th, but the hardcover there comes out on the 15th to coincide with my UK visit starting the next day.)

My job here is to convince you to want to read it in a few hundred words or less, which is a weird job. I remember reading a Robert Jordan interview back in the day where someone asked him to summarize what his book was about, and he replied something along the lines of, “I wrote it at the length I did because that’s how long it took to tell that story properly. So read it, and you’ll find out what it’s about.”

Wise words from Mr. Jordan, though the realities of us all having too much to fill our time means that I should take a stab at helping you understand this book in a short few words. So here goes.

It is awesome.

Too short? All right, well, Shadows of Self is the continuing adventures of two Allomancers from the Roughs who get sucked into big-city politics and crimes. It’s like if Clint Eastwood had magical gunslinging powers, and starred in a 1910s New York City version of CSI—along with his sidekick, Simon Pegg playing a barely-reformed, lecherous pickpocket with the ability to freeze time. Including cameos from the original Mistborn trilogy sprinkled throughout.

I do suggest you start with The Alloy of Law, the first book of this new sequence—as it is intended as a new entry point to the Mistborn world. (If you read that already, there are preview chapters of the new book here.) But I feel you’ll love these books—there are a striking number of readers who prefer the new era Mistborn books, which is shocking to me but also very flattering.

Either way, they’re intended to be fun, fast-paced, and interesting to act as a balance to Stormlight, which is long, epic, and requires a lot of mental energy to keep track of the large cast. I plan to do shorter books like this with Mistborn until I get to a break point in Stormlight, then move to a new Mistborn era and do some longer books, before jumping back to Stormlight. That way, I’m never asking you to read two series with large casts and a lot to keep track of.

That doesn’t mean the books aren’t deep. But these are more tightly focused on a handful of characters, with plots more personal to them, rather than dealing with sweeping conflicts affecting entire continents.

So go check it out! I really hope you’ll enjoy it, and come see me on my tour in both the United States and the United Kingdom! Dates are found here, linked in my events section. Note that everyone coming to the Denver signing today at 6:00 will get a numbered copy of the book!

Come back later in the week when I dig a little further into why I created the Mistborn series the way I did, and how this new sequence fits into the larger puzzle.

Brandon