So I just picked up my copy of "Empire of Ivory" and innocently browsed through the book, when on the last pages an advert jumps into my face, which gives away the story's surprise ending in highly visible bold, large letters. I am by no means someone who starts a book with reading the final pages, but shouldn't it be possible to initially browse through a book and turn a few pages without getting the cliffhanger rubbed in your face? Congratulations to Del Rey for this magnificent stunt, but would you please think it through next time?

So here goes a warning to all fans who would like to get surprised: Keep away from the final pages of this book if you don't want to get spoiled!

Today the fourth novel of Naomi Novik's charming Temeraire-series hits the stores. Its title is "Empire of Ivory" and it is already known that the story will be about a mysterious and deadly plague that affects only dragons. In previous interviews Novik also mentioned that parts of the story will take place in Africa this time, so there's much room for new explorations of her rich alternative 19th century world.

Also, as you can see, we thought this would be a splendid occasion to launch our site Temeraire.de in English! Most of the information comes of course straight from the Wiki over at www.temeraire.org, but we hope that we will have a big site with lots of different content set up in the near future, so stay tuned!