NEW YORK, June 16, 2026 — Brandon Sanderson does not, as a rule, collaborate. His singular productivity, the meticulous magic systems his novels are built around, and the Cosmere-spanning architecture of his existing work have kept him operating largely alone for two decades. When he does open the door to a collaborator, it is worth paying attention. When the collaborator is Peter Orullian, a novelist and working musician whose previous fiction has been marked by an unusual sensitivity to the connection between sound and metaphysics, it is worth paying closer attention. And when the resulting book opens what is being called the Strata Wars, an entirely new fantasy sequence set in a London that stretches downward through every era of its own past, it is worth reading.

SONGS OF THE DEAD, published today by Tor Books, is that book. It is the launch of a new fantasy sequence. It is a contemporary London novel. It is a horror-adjacent supernatural adventure. And it is, most centrally, an experiment in what a fantasy novel can do when its magic system is built not on runes or elements or invocations but on light and music, deployed by a struggling West End musician who has been killed and has come back to something more complicated than life.

What the Book Is

Jack Solomon is a rock musician working the West End of London, chasing the version of a music career that involves waiting tables between gigs and hoping the next set will be the one that changes everything. What changes everything is that he is killed. What he learns, on the far side of that death, is that the London he has been living in is only the topmost layer of the city, and that beneath it, in ordered strata that reach back through every era of the city’s recorded history, live the accumulated pasts of every Londoner who came before.

The dead are not, in this novel, resting. Many of them, in the deeper strata, are furious. Their anger is being channeled and directed by a powerful society of magic wielders who can move between the layers of history and between the boundaries of life and death, and who have decided, for reasons the book unfolds carefully, that the present should not be allowed to continue on the terms it has established. What is at stake, by the time Jack understands what he has been drawn into, is not one man’s second life. It is the entire architecture of history’s relationship with the living present.

Jack, armed with the light-and-music-based magic he did not know he had, becomes the fulcrum on which the Strata Wars begin.

A Magic System Only This Collaboration Could Have Built

The premise of a magic system built on light and music is the kind of premise that could go badly in less careful hands. Fantasy is littered with attempts to make music magical that reduce the music to hand-waving flourish. What Sanderson and Orullian have built here is more precise. Music, in SONGS OF THE DEAD, is not a metaphor. It is a physical technology, governed by rules the novel establishes with the patience Sanderson’s readers have come to expect from him, and the sensitivity to actual musicianship that Orullian, a working musician and touring vocalist for years, brings to the collaboration.

The result is a magic system in which a rock musician’s real skills, his ear for a hook, his understanding of what a specific note does to a room, his ability to hold a phrase, become the tools of a mage’s craft. Readers who have followed Sanderson through his various magic systems (Allomancy, Surgebinding, Awakening, and beyond) will recognize the meticulous internal logic. Readers coming to Sanderson for the first time, drawn by the contemporary setting and the London hook, will find a magic system that rewards close attention and that operates on genuinely new terms.

Why the Setting Matters

Urban fantasy has a long and often disappointing history of treating London as backdrop rather than as material. What Sanderson and Orullian have done, in the layered-London conceit at the heart of the novel, is take the city’s actual historical density seriously. Roman London is not a costume the novel puts on for a chapter. It is a stratum. Medieval London is not a set piece. It is a stratum. The London of the Blitz, the London of the eighteenth-century coffeehouses, the London of Elizabeth I, all sit beneath the London Jack Solomon has been playing gigs in, and all of them, in the world of this novel, are still populated.

What that architecture allows is a novel in which the past is not a story the present has finished telling itself. The past is a place. It has residents. It has grievances. It has, as the Strata Wars begin, an active claim on what happens next. That is a rare and genuinely productive premise, and it gives the sequence Sanderson and Orullian are launching a scale and a possibility very few contemporary fantasy series have opened with.

Why Sanderson Collaborated

The question every Sanderson reader will ask about SONGS OF THE DEAD is why he opened his usually solo practice to a co-writer for this particular project. The book itself answers the question. This is a novel that requires, at its core, a genuinely musician-informed sensibility. Orullian’s background as a working vocalist, songwriter, and touring musician gives the book something Sanderson alone could not have provided: the actual textures of what it feels like to hold a note, to work a room, to spend one’s life inside the practical craft of music. Combined with Sanderson’s architectural instincts around magic systems and long-arc series construction, the collaboration produces a book that feels genuinely dual-authored in the best sense. Neither writer’s fingerprints obscure the other’s. Both writers’ strengths are visible on every page.

Why It Matters

SONGS OF THE DEAD is the launch of a fantasy sequence at a scale and ambition that only a small number of writers in the genre can credibly attempt. It is Brandon Sanderson doing something he almost never does: opening a new world alongside a collaborator he clearly trusts. It is Peter Orullian being brought into a level of readership and attention that his own previous work has quietly deserved for years. It is, for readers of contemporary fantasy, one of the most consequential launches of 2026.

The Strata Wars have begun. The battlefield is London. The weapon is music. The stakes, on the evidence of this first volume, are exactly what Sanderson series readers have learned to expect: the kind that keep you reading past midnight and reaching for the next installment before you have finished the current one.

SONGS OF THE DEAD by Brandon Sanderson and Peter Orullian is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook wherever books are sold. Published by Tor Books.

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