The Merchants' War - (Merchant Princes) by Charles Stross (Paperback)

About the Book

In this entry in the series that includes "The Family Trade, The Hidden Family," and "The Clan Corporate," Miriam Beckstein, a young business journalist in Boston, has escaped to yet another world and remains in hiding from both the Clan and its opponents.

Book Synopsis

Miriam Beckstein is a young, hip, business journalist in Boston. She discovered in The Family Trade and The Hidden Family that her family came from an alternate reality, that she was very well-connected, and that her family was too much like the mafia for comfort. She found herself caught in a family trap in The Clan Corporate and betrothed to a brain-damaged prince, and then all hell broke loose.

Now, in The Merchants' War, Miriam has escaped to yet another world and remains in hiding from both the Clan and their opponents. There is a nasty shooting war going on in the Gruinmarkt world of the Clan, and we know something that Miriam does not; something that she's really going to hate--if she lives long enough to find out.

Review Quotes

"The Clan Corporate offers more proof, if any were needed, why Charles Stross has become universally acknowledged as one of science fiction's major new talents." --Mike Resnick

"The Hidden Family is a festival of ideas in action, fast moving and often very funny, but underpinned by a rigorous logical strategy. . . .Stross's breezy, almost Heinleinian mode of narration is on fine display in The Hidden Family." --Locus

"Stross continues to mix high and low tech in amusing and surprising ways. . . .[he] weaves a tale worthy of Robert Ludlum or Dan Brown." --Publishers Weekly on The Hidden Family

"It's simply a great adventure, full of danger, of plots within plots, of forbidden love and political murder." --Orson Scott Card on The Family Trade

About the Author

Charles Stross is the author of the bestselling Merchant Princes series, the Laundry series, and several stand-alone novels including Glasshouse, Accelerando, and Saturn's Children. Born in Leeds, England, in 1964, Stross studied in London and Bradford, earning degrees in pharmacy and computer science. Over the next decade and a half he worked as a pharmacist, a technical writer, a software engineer, and eventually as a prolific journalist covering the IT industry. His short fiction began attracting wide attention in the late 1990s; his first novel, Singularity Sky, appeared in 2003. He has subsequently won the Hugo Award twice. He lives with his wife in Edinburgh, Scotland, in a flat that is slightly older than the state of Texas