Empire of Silence (Deluxe Hardcover)

**Special deluxe edition with sprayed edges, premium cover effects, map, new foreword, bonus content, and the short story ＂The Pits of Emesh＂**

Hadrian Marlowe, a man revered as a hero and despised as a murderer, chronicles his tale in the galaxy-spanning debut of the Sun Eater series, merging the best of space opera and epic fantasy.

Ambitious universe-building combines with intimate character portraits for storytelling on a truly epic scale--for fans of Orson Scott Card, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Patrick Rothfuss and Jack Campbell

It was not his war.

On the wrong planet, at the right time, for the best reasons, Hadrian Marlowe started down a path that could only end in fire. The galaxy remembers him as a hero: the man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. They remember him as a monster: the devil who destroyed a sun, casually annihilating four billion human lives--even the Emperor himself--against Imperial orders.

But Hadrian was not a hero. He was not a monster. He was not even a soldier.

Fleeing his father and a future as a torturer, Hadrian finds himself stranded on a strange, backwater world. Forced to fight as a gladiator and into the intrigues of a foreign planetary court, he will find himself fight a war he did not start, for an Empire he does not love, against an enemy he will never understand.

Christopher Ruocchio is the internationally award-winning author of the Sun Eater, a series blending elements of both science fiction and fantasy, as well as more than twenty-five works of short fiction. A graduate of North Carolina State University, he sold his first novel, Empire of Silence, at twenty-two. His books have appeared in nine languages. Christopher lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife and children.