NORTHVANEPRESS
An independent press

Stories that hold true north.

NorthVane Press publishes the novels and nonfiction of N. A. Vane: historical adventure, dark fantasy, comedy with a long memory, and a book-length argument about what it means to be human. Every title is on Amazon in print and Kindle.

The catalogue

Books

The Tenth Stroke cover
Pre-order · Out Oct 23, 2026Historical fiction

The Tenth Stroke

A Novel of the Sulu Sea, 1825

N. A. Vane · 286 pages

On this coast, a debt is not written down. It is notched.

1825. The raiders of the Sulu Sea take what they want from the Visayan coast, and what they take most is people. When a Balangingi captain seizes the daughter of a village headman, he thinks he has taken cargo. He has taken the one captive who can read the Spanish letters bargaining over her price. Every ransom offer now passes through her hands. A friar in Zamboanga is trying to buy her back. The captain is deciding what she is worth. And she is learning exactly what each of them will pay, and what it will cost her to go home.

  • Kindle (pre-order)
  • Paperback coming soon
  • Hardcover coming soon
What the Water Keeps cover
Dark fantasy

What the Water Keeps

Grief is water, Honor is stone.

N. A. Vane · 208 pages

Her people have one law above all others. She is about to break it.

At the edge of the great forest, a huntress of the Blue Mountains meets a trader of the giant Arxii, a man her people's oldest law forbids her to love. What follows is one season of stolen fires, and a killing staged to look like a monster's work. Thirty years later, the silence still holds, kept by a father, a scholar, and the one man who was never permitted to mourn.

Some crimes are never confessed. Some loves are never allowed. And in the river country, the water keeps everything it is given.

  • Kindle
  • Paperback
Everything I Know Is True cover
ComedyTime travel

Everything I Know Is True

Knowledge is power, unless…

N. A. Vane

Kyle has watched every survival documentary ever made. He is about to find out which ones were wrong.

One too many beers, one too many brags: Kyle can survive anywhere. The next morning he wakes in Marcus Aurelius's Rome. The morning after, a Viking farmstead. Then Mansa Musa's Cairo. Then a pirate fleet. He can't sleep until he survives a good day, he can't go home until he works out who is running this game, and history's greatest figures are nothing like the documentaries. Napoleon has no patience. Leonidas has opinions. And Kyle's confidence keeps getting him into trouble his knowledge can't get him out of.

  • Kindle
  • Paperback
The Machine That Thinks It's Free cover
Nonfiction

The Machine That Thinks It's Free

What is it to be Human?

N. A. Vane · 20 chapters

You think you chose to pick up this book. Are you sure?

Every day you make thousands of decisions, and nearly all of them were made before you noticed. Habit, instinct, wiring, history: the machinery runs quietly and lets you believe you're driving. Across twenty chapters, this book follows that machinery from the choices we're proud of to the ones we'd rather not examine. And it ends where the argument has to: if a human is a machine that thinks it's free, what separates us from the machines we're building now? More data? More experience? More source code, perhaps?

  • Kindle
  • Paperback
On the desk

Coming next

BOOK ONE · COMING DECEMBER 2026

Ashes of Brennmark

A dark fantasy in five books

Book One

A Death for the Deathless

They cannot die. That has always been the first law of Brennmark.

Then one of the deathless is found dead inside the walls, and the oldest city on the burning borderland begins to come apart. Elders who have ruled for centuries turn on each other. Ferals gather at the gates. And the magic that holds it all together, the magic that eats a little more of you each time, starts to take more than it should.

A Death for the Deathless. The first book of Ashes of Brennmark.

Ashes of Brennmark teaser: a cloaked figure faces a walled city under a sky of drifting faces; below, scenes from the book: a woman with light in her hands, a lovers' embrace, the burning city gate, and a woman holding a knife. Book One, A Death for the Deathless, coming December 2026.
The press

About NorthVane Press

NorthVane Press is the home of the books of N. A. Vane. It is a small press with one standard: every book is made to the same finish as anything on a bookstore shelf, from the manuscript to the trim, the cover and the typesetting.

The list crosses genres on purpose. A novel of the Sulu Sea researched down to the size of a harbor sits beside a comedy that sends one man through eleven centuries, and both sit beside a serious book about what it is to be human. The owl on our spines is keeping watch over all of them.

All titles are sold through Amazon in Kindle and print editions. New books appear here first.

About N. A. Vane

N. A. Vane writes across the line between fiction and nonfiction, and is mostly interested in the same question from either side: how much of what we call choice is actually ours.

The novels take that question into other worlds: a river country where grief has weight and honor has a price, a comic collision between a man who knows everything and a past that doesn't care, and the Sulu Sea in 1825, where a captive learns to read the letters negotiating her own sale. The nonfiction asks it directly.

CONTACT

Readers, reviewers and booksellers can reach the press by email.

contact@northvanepress.com

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