Publisher: Head of Zeus (ebook – 15 October 2025)
Series: The Tyrant Philosophers – Book 2.5
Length: 128 pages
My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
From the amazing mind of Adrian Tchaikovsky comes a brilliant and heartfelt fantasy novella Lives of Bitter Rain, an outstanding read that provides some intriguing extra context to one of the author’s previous impressive releases.
Last year I had the great pleasure of reading the amazing Days of Shattered Faith by the legendary Adrian Tchaikovsky. The third book in the author’s outstanding Tyrant Philosophers series (which previously featured City of Last Chances and House of Open Wounds), Days of Shattered Faith was an exceptional read that perfectly continued the loosely connected Tyrant Philosophers series with a tale of betrayal, personal growth and diplomacy gone wild in a world slowly being taken over by an empire of religion-hating perfectionists, the Palleseen. I deeply enjoyed Days of Shattered Faith, which ended up being one of my favourite books and audiobooks of 2025, and I have been eagerly awaiting the next entry in the series for some time. However, before I get to that, I decided to also check out awesome novella Lives of Bitter Rain from Tchaikovsky, which served as an interesting companion-piece to Days of Shattered Faith, with a powerful and heartfelt personal story behind it.
Plot Synopsis:
City-by-city, kingdom-by-kingdom, the Palleseen have sworn to bring ‘Perfection’ and ‘Correctness’ to an imperfect world. But before these ruthless Tyrant Philosophers send in their legions, they despatch Outreach – the rain before the storm.
Outreach is that part of the Pal machine responsible for diplomacy – converting enemies into friends, achieving through words what an army of five thousand could not, urging the oppressed to overthrow the bloody-handed priests, evil necromancers and greedy despots that subjugate them.
Angilly, twelve-years-old, a child of Pal soldiers stationed in occupied Jarokir, does not know it yet, but a sequence of accidents and questionable life choices will lead her to Outreach. As she travels from Jarrokir to Bracinta, Cazarkand, Lemas, The Holy Regalate of Stouk and finally, Usmai, she’ll learn that the price of her nation’s success is paid in compromise and lost chances, and that the falling rain will always be bitter.
Lives of Bitter Rain was a very clever and highly addictive novella that dives into one of the main characters of Days of Shattered Faith, Sage-Invigilator Angilly, the Palleseen ambassador who spent most of the book caught between her duties and responsibilities to her people, and her feelings for the crown prince of the nation she was assigned to. Providing a compelling personal history of Angilly that was mostly left out of Days of Shattered Faith, Lives of Bitter Rain is a wonderful tie-in to the main book that will appeal to a wide audience.
Starting off fast, as any good novella should, Lives of Bitter Rain quickly dives into the formative events of Angilly’s childhood and captured the tragic events and influences that led her to join Outreach. From there, the book covers how Angilly went from a brainwashed Palleseen orphan to the more flexible and unconventional figure we meet in Days of Shattered Faith. This leads naturally to the second half of Lives of Bitter Rains’ short narrative, which shows Angilly’s assignment to the nation of Usmai and the start of the relationship that will bring her so much pain in the accompanying full novel. Tchaikovsky does an outstanding job tying up all the loose ends surrounding this main character by the end of Lives of Bitter Rain, which provides some intriguing and deeply tragic context to this character’s actions in advance of the story from Days of Shattered Faith.
This proved to be an exceptional new release from Tchaikovsky, who provides a short and sweet read in Lives of Bitter Rain. I really enjoyed how intense and complex he made this novella, which told its own unique story while also providing some excellent additional character work. The expansion of Angilly’s personal history, as well as her experiences in Usmai before the events of Days of Shattered Faith, really provides some fantastic context around a lot of her actions and emotional connections in the later story. This was honestly a very perfect prequel narrative, and you can clearly see that Tchaikovsky had all these details about this character’s past and motivations in his head when he wrote Days of Shattered Faith. Throw in some fantastic extra worldbuilding for his Tyrant Philosophers universe, especially for the always fascinating Palleseen, and this was an exceptional novella that I couldn’t get enough of.
One of the key things readers must consider when reading Lives of Bitter Rain is whether to enjoy it before or after Days of Shattered Faith. Both options have some appeal to it, although I personally read it after enjoying the main novel, which meant that Lives of Bitter Rain provided a certain post-mortem enjoyment which I deeply appreciated. Not only did you finally get some lingering questions about Angilly answered but it also ensured that I found certain events from the book a little more tragic in retrospect. However, if I had read Lives of Bitter Rain in advance, I would have had a better idea of Angilly’s personality and relationships, as well as some advance knowledge about Usmai and the city of Alkhalend, both of which would have helped me appreciate the narrative more as I was reading it. I personally think that I made the right choice reading Lives of Bitter Rain after Days of Shattered Faith, but there really isn’t a wrong answer here and readers who do it either way are guaranteed to have an amazing time with this cool, prequel novella.
Overall, Lives of Bitter Rain comes very highly recommended, especially for those who have already got caught up in the magic and insanity of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Tyrant Philosophers series. An exceedingly clever prequel novella with some deep character work behind it, Lives of Bitter Rain was well-worth the read, and I am now even more excited to dive into the recently released fourth Tyrant Philosopher’s novel, Pretenders to the Throne of God.
The Unseen Library 