Steph Post’s exceptional world-building is on full display in Terra Incognita, a novel that first appeared in 2024 in a limited run of 100 hand-crafted copies. The book quickly earned acclaim, winning the Florida Book Awards Gold Medal for Fiction, and was re-released as an ebook in May 2025.
The story opens in 1800s New York City, where professional pickpocket Lily Vane targets a gentleman explorer, Sir Ashmore Bedivere. Amid the chaos of a boxing match and a gang turf war at a dive called the Barking Iron, Lily manages to steal Ashmore’s ring—but circumstances beyond her control lead to her capture. Luckily, Ashmore needs someone with her criminal skills on an expedition to Tangier and Romania in search of the lost city of Alatyra. To avoid a lengthy prison sentence, Lily agrees to accompany Ashmore. From that moment on, she’s swept into a series of harrowing adventures.
Ashmore is joined by his wife Cristabel and three men—Sebastian, Felix, and Theo—each chosen for their particular skills. While the main narrative is full of action and close escapes, the novel also features detours into myth, character backstories, and entries from Sebastian’s journal that slow down the plot considerably. Yet, one important character readers first meet through these diversions is the mysterious Julian, whose role in Ashmore’s life is gradually revealed.
One of the novel’s strengths is the emotional bond that develops among the adventurers. Isolated and unattached at the journey’s outset, they gradually form a makeshift family. Theo captures this dynamic in a powerful reflection to Lily:
“It’s not weakness to care, you know. Whether or not we believe in Alatyra, we must believe in each other. Cristabel made a pretty speech about trust, but trust is fickle. I doubt she even trusts herself. Belief is different, though. And our faith means we can hurt for others. Will hurt for others. Pain will always be the price to pay for such a covenant.”
Post’s vivid settings are another highlight. The Barking Iron is rendered with gritty precision:
“The gallery above the boxers was a rat’s nest. Choked with smoke, with bodies jostling, men leaning far over the splintery rail, women behind them… Lily slipped through the crowd easily, dodging elbows and errant hands, finding every shadow cast and wrapping herself in its comfort…”
Post does an equally superb job describing the markets of Tangier, with its confusing side alleys and maze of narrow streets. And the whole world of people who “lived under a Mountain of Glass and drank from The Well of the World” is created in exquisite detail, with these “golden people living in a Golden Age, hiding away from the wars of lesser men and the tricks and treachery of the gods.” Even the silence as the adventurers journey inside the mountain to find the lost city is not just silence, but an absence of sound that creeps eerily under the skin:
“As soon as the steep rock walls sealed them in, the world turned silent. No rosefinches chattered, no crag martins swooped overhead, no insects hummed or fiddled. There were no leaves to rustle and no breeze to murmur through them if there had been. The gorge must have been worn through—Sebastian quietly informed her—by an ancient, raging river, long ago run dry. But now there were no signs of life at all. Only the grave reticence of the rocks and the ever-eclipsing sky above.
All save Sebastian reflected the silence back. Lily could tell his nerves were starting to tatter because he kept up a steady, one-sided dialogue directed toward enlightening her, but clearly for his benefit alone. Between the ragged breaths beginning to ring in her ears, she caught snatches of his lecture. Tertiary. Breathe. Alluvial. Syncline. Breathe. Breathe. Karst. Gneiss. Schist. Breathe. His words meant absolutely nothing to Lily, but his voice was the wind at her back, driving her on. Drowning out the needles of disquietude that grew sharper with every step.”
Sebastian, who knows all about rocks, geology, and climbing, lectures to cover his fear of what lies ahead.
While the journal entries and mythic interludes occasionally distract from the main narrative, Terra Incognita remains a gripping, atmospheric read. At its heart, the novel is a meditation on obsession, morality, and the human cost of ambition. Ashmore and Julian, in particular, are compelling portrayals of men pushed to their ethical limits in pursuit of a dream. Will they stop at nothing? And what toll will their quest take on those who follow them?
To discover the answers, you’ll have to read Terra Incognita yourself.
Steph Post
Steph Post is the recipient of the Patricia Cornwell Scholarship for creative writing from Davidson College and the Vereen Bell Award for Fiction. She holds a Master’s degree in Graduate Liberal Studies from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her short fiction has appeared in Haunted Waters: From the Depths, The Round-Up, The Gambler Mag, Foliate Oak, Kentucky Review, Vending Machine Press, Nonbinary Review, and the anthology Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics. Her debut novel, A Tree Born Crooked, was a semi-finalist for The Big Moose Prize. She currently serves as a writing coach at Howard W. Blake High School in Tampa, Florida.
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