Legends & Lattes

Legends & Lattes is a fantasy novel by the American author Travis Baldree, first published by Cryptid Press on 22 February 2022. Tor Books brought out a second edition that November, and the first British edition came from Tor UK, with an added prequel story called 'Pages to Fill'. It reached the finalists' list for Best Fantasy at the 2022 Goodreads Choice Awards and for Best Novel at both the Nebula and Hugo Awards in 2023, and it began as a self-published book before the Tor editions appeared.

Viv is an orc mercenary who has spent years solving problems with an axe and has decided to stop, in preference to the usual orc retirement plan of dying in battle. She claims one treasure from her band's last job, a Scalvert's Stone reputed to bring its owner fortune, and arrives in the town of Thune with a plan to open the first coffee shop anyone there has seen. Her old companions are a varied crew, and the stone is the reason she can afford to try, though it also marks her as worth robbing.

She buys an abandoned stable and starts hiring: a hob carpenter called Cal, an artistic succubus called Tandri, and eventually a baker, a bard and a dire-cat. The coffee takes time to catch on with people who have never tasted it, the local protection racket is suspicious of her, and one of her former colleagues wants the stone. What she builds instead is a small business, a neighbourhood and a new life.

The book is deliberately low on grand conflict, and it is the first of a pair of novels set around the same shop. A prequel, Bookshops and Bonedust, followed in November 2023, and the two books are read as companion stories rather than as one continuous plot.