What if someone you love gambled on her life?

Games are serious business on Salaria, and the stakes are high. When Kia's older sister, in a desperate bid to erase their family debt, loses the game and forfeits her freedom, Kia is determined to rescue her.

Disguised as a Salarian, Kia becomes Idaro in order to move freely in this dangerous new culture. When she arrives on Salaria, she learns it's a world where a few key players control the board, and the pawns are ready to revolt. Kia joins the conflict, risking everything to save her sister. As if she doesn't already have enough to handle, Agatha, the maddeningly calm and unpredictable Select who lives life both by-the-book and off-the-cuff shows up to help, along with handsome Norio, a strong-willed desert girl with her own agenda, and a group of Salarian teens earning their rite of passage in the treacherous desert game.

What can an interpreter and former thief possibly do in the midst of all this to keep the people she loves alive?

"Look out, C. J. Cherryh! Step aside, Hal Clement! There's a new master of truly alien SF, and her name is J. A. McLachlan. THE WALLS OF WIND is doubtless THE debut novel of the year." - Hugo award-winning Author Robert J. SawyerWhat if males and females were completely different species from each other?WALLS OF WIND explores this question and its ramifications on an alien world in which males and females are two equally intelligent sentient species: Ghen and Bria. They are interdependent and reproductively symbiotic, although physically, emotionally and mentally they have little in common. Or so they believe, until their city-state is threatened by increasing internal conflict and a terrifying external predator that has invaded the forests just beyond their walls. A handful of Ghen and Bria struggle desperately to find a solution before their civilization is destroyed.

"Look out, C. J. Cherryh! Step aside, Hal Clement! There's a new master of truly alien SF, and her name is J. A. McLachlan. THE WALLS OF WIND is doubtless THE debut novel of the year." - Hugo award-winning Author Robert J. SawyerWhat if males and females were completely different species from each other?WALLS OF WIND explores this question and its ramifications on an alien world in which males and females are two equally intelligent sentient species: Ghen and Bria. They are interdependent and reproductively symbiotic, although physically, emotionally and mentally they have little in common. Or so they believe, until their city-state is threatened by increasing internal conflict and a terrifying external predator that has invaded the forests just beyond their walls. A handful of Ghen and Bria struggle desperately to find a solution before their civilization is destroyed.