The Hurricane Wars

The Hurricane Wars is Thea Guanzon's debut novel and the first book of a fantasy romance trilogy. Harper Voyager published it in 2023. The book grew out of two things Guanzon has spoken about: a long-running Star Wars fan fiction that paired its leads in an arranged marriage, and Philippine mythology and history, which supply the texture of the world and its politics.

The setting is a war that has been running for twenty years between the Sardovian Allfold and the Kesathese Night Empire. It began when the Lightweavers of Sunstead killed the Night Emperor, and the empire answered by destroying Sunstead and hunting the Lightweavers down. Talasyn, a soldier for the Sardovian army, is one of the last of them, and she has kept what she can do hidden since birth.

Alaric Ossinast is the son of the current Night Emperor, shaped since childhood into his father's weapon and undefeated until he meets Talasyn. Her light magic cuts through the empire's shadows, their powers respond to each other in a way neither side can explain, and both nations take an interest in the result. The pair are pushed into an alliance by the people who run their countries, and neither of them trusts the arrangement.

The title carries the book's two halves: a conflict that has been given the name Hurricane Wars, and the weather that keeps arriving with it, over drowned and storm-scoured territory. Harper Voyager published the sequel, A Monsoon Rising, in 2024, and the trilogy was still to be completed at that point, so the first book is an opening rather than a self-contained story.