The Chaos Space Marines regrouped and nurtured their hatred of the Imperium, planning for the day when they would wreak a terrible vengeance on those who had defied them and their foul masters. Within the Eye time flows differently than in realspace.

The Imperial sectors surrounding the Eye of Terror were heavily militarised to resist these frequent invasions and none more so than Cadia, the Imperial Fortress World that stands at the very mouth of the only stable navigational route leading out of the Eye of Terror, the dreaded Cadian Gate.

Cadia was known to have at least three major landmasses, the continents of Cadia Primus, Cadia Secundus and Cadia Tertius. As noted, these continents possessed a wide variety of biomes and ecosystems, stretching from arctic tundra in the far north to boreal forests of the coniferous, pine-like axel-trees and temperate plains in the milder latitudes.

It then moves to a story of betrayal and rebellion, in which the incompetent military fail to notice an army of 100,000 slaughtering everyone in a vast refugee camp on their doorstep. Now the Guardsmen and women of Cadia find themselves without a world to call their own. With no home, no way to re-populate their regiment when they inevitably take losses, they are, quite literally, the last of a dying breed. Unfortunately, given how much praise is leveled at smaller scale combat, you can imagine what we're going to delve into with the next bit. Cadian society in the 41st Millennium is more martial than civilian, mostly due to the disproportionate ratio of soldiers to citizens in its population. The birth rate and the military recruitment rate are synonymous. Most Cadian children learn to field-strip a Lasgun by the age of ten standard years, and many young Cadians served in the Astra Militarum as Whiteshields. Enjoyed this book as a “boots on the ground” view of the Fall of Cadia. Rather than focus on major characters or events from that large narrative event, we get disjointed stories from across the planet as several character threads are followed in the cataclysmic battle for the world.

The less you know about WH40K, the more you’ll enjoy Cadia Stands. Ostensibly a plot-centric novel, the author starts well with two diverse POVs: an officer and a grunt. Unfortunately, the author doesn’t provide them with character arcs and then introduces another ten viewpoints in hopes of painting a coherent picture of War Zone Cadia. Yet even armed with a literary montage, the result fails to enlighten anyone and is ultimately unsatisfying. This story has fantastic potential. The BEF after Dunkirk, the allies evacuating Gallipoli or the march of the 10000 men are great examples of defeated armies making themselves into heroic legends. How these groups were viewed at the time I’m sure is completely different to how we see their heroism today and almost certainly very different to how they saw their own defeats. JH: I think this is being envisaged as the first Minka Lesk novel so you could go straight in, but if you want to get the full setting then reading Cadia Stands gives you the set up. And if you really like stories of common grunts facing down all the horrors of the 40K universe, then there’s a ream of Ursarkar E. Creed stories ( you can find here) which I think have been hugely well received. I haven’t read this, the third book in the Dawn of Fire series, so I can’t say too much about it. From what I understand though, it changes the focus of the series away from Imperial forces battling Chaos and onto the Space Wolves facing off against the greenskin menace led by the legendary ork warlord Ghazgkhull Thraka. The point at which the old ‘5 minutes to midnight’ 40k setting started to change was when Games Workshop started building up to the Great Rift, the huge Warp storm which has split the galaxy in two. Big events included the fall of Cadia, the troubled birth of Ynnead (the aeldari god of the dead), and the miraculous resurrection of Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the Ultramarines. For the sake of ease I’ve referred to this whole era as the Gathering Storm.