A Market of Dreams and Destiny by Trip Galey

(Titan Books, 2023)

Reviewed by Steven French

These days Covent Garden is a well-known tourist destination, famous for its craft market, buskers, bars and restaurants. A hundred and fifty years ago it had a much seedier reputation, subsequently leavened somewhat in the popular imagination by Shaw’s flower-seller, Eliza Doolittle. And it is around this time that Galey’s rich and engaging fantasy novel is set, albeit in a very different London than that of Shaw or Dickens. This is the metropolis that was shaped by a treaty signed between two powerful queens: Elizabeth I and Tatiana, the Faery monarch. And so, underneath Covent Garden Market lies another, the ‘Untermarkt’, where dreams and desires, power and abilities are for sale, all for the right price of course, where that may not be measured in pounds, shillings or pence. Ducking and diving through this goblin market on a daily basis is Deri (Welsh for ‘oak’), the indentured servant of Maurlocke, a renowned and powerful merchant whose grip on Deri’s activities is firm, occasionally brutal but not so tight that the lad can’t find ways to make a little for himself on the side, with the aim of buying out of his contract in a year or two. That aim suddenly appears much, much closer when Deri is faced with an opportunity he really can’t turn down: the chance to acquire the destiny of a Crown Princess.

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Review from BSFA Review 22 - Download your copy here.