M.A. Grant’s Honour Bound has been nominated for Favourite Sci Fi, Fantasy or Futuristic Romance in the 2015 ARRAs.
I cannot adequately express how grateful I am to the readers who nominated Honour Bound for an ARRA award.
The sequel to award-winning Lace & Lead, Honour Bound doesn’t fit neatly into any one category. It’s kind of Gears of War or Call of Duty meets King Arthur in the lands beyond Hadrian’s Wall. The romance between Talia and Cade is star-crossed, but the bonds of love and loyalty between Cade’s squad are just as important. The book is dystopian fiction with a government so corrupt I felt grimy from writing it. It’s ripping action, political intrigue, romance and humour thrown into a rucksack and shaken around until it settles.
Strong characters were needed to hold this plot together. Cade could be the Republic’s golden boy, if not for his pesky habit of using his free will and believing in an equality the government refuses to grant to all its citizens. Talia is more than his equal; she survived years of internment at a forced labour camp by becoming a cage fighter and is beloved by the despised tribal people of the Wastes. Cade and Talia weren’t ready for each other at their first meeting, but years later, the broken edges formed from their suffering help them fit together perfectly.
Talia balances out Cade’s squad. His ‘strays’ are bound by a long-forgotten law and together they manage to stay alive despite the Republic’s best efforts to kill them off. They’re a family forged in the heat of battle and Cade will do anything to protect them. They may have been brought together by the government, but they only trust each other, and for good reason.
That government, the Republic, is what pushes this story into true dystopian territory. A zealous dictator, a shadow government run by the corrupt nouveau-riche, treason, lawmen leaving the service to become mercenaries, people too afraid to challenge their oppression, and a terrifying rebel force gaining power through a campaign of violence help lead to a perfect storm that Cade and his squad must face.
This was one of the hardest books I’ve ever written, but is also the book I’m most proud of. I love my boys and Talia, I love the world they inhabit, and I love that writing this story left me emotionally wrung out—but in a really good way. Hopefully it’ll do the same to you when you read it.
The Lawmen of the Republic: fierce, honourable, soldiers, men. But what happens when all that they’ve been told turns out to be lies?