Long Live Evil
core novel 2024 Time of Iron
Record
| First published | 2024 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.83 (23,649 ratings, collected 2026-08-30) |
| Page count | 431 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780316568715 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
A dying woman strikes a magical bargain for a second chance at life by entering the world of her favorite fantasy series, only to wake in a castle beside a hellish chasm and discover that she has become not the story's heroine, but its villainess, Lady Rahela, in the tale of the Emperor. Rather than fighting the role fate has handed her, she leans into the villainess's reputation for cruelty and cunning, using the character's resources, and her own reader's knowledge of the plot she thinks she remembers, to try to bend the story toward outcomes better than the ones originally written for Rahela. As she navigates court intrigue, uneasy alliances, and a cast of characters she once only read about, she quickly learns that knowing how a story is supposed to go and controlling how it actually unfolds are two very different things.
Where it sits
- Universe: Time of Iron
- Series: Time of Iron core; position 1 of 2 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Sarah Rees Brennan
Awards (verified)
- European Science Fiction Society Award (Achievement Award, Best Written Work of Fiction), 2025: won; Presented at Archipelacon 2 (Aland).
- British Fantasy Award (Fantasy Novel (Robert Holdstock Award)), 2025: nominated; One of five nominees; the award went to a different novel that year.
Notes
- From the series record (Time of Iron): A planned trilogy; a third volume (working title known but unpublished as of this research pass) has been announced but is not yet released, so it is not catalogued here.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series Time of Iron: position 1 of 2: next All Hail Chaos (2026)
Sources
- Hachette Book Group: Long Live Evil
- Wikipedia: Sarah Rees Brennan
- NCSF: 2025 ESFS Awards
- Science Fiction Awards Database, British Fantasy Awards 2025
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