Press Kit – Fayaz Shah

Fayaz Shah is the author of six urban fantasy novels set in London, all part of the Nytherian Universe, a cosmological spirit realm suspended between two ancient nebulae, one thousand light-years from Earth. Since 2009, Shah has been building a single connected fictional world in which London serves not merely as a backdrop but as the primary portal between the human realm and a civilisation of spirit beings who have been quietly shaping human history for centuries.

His third novel, Breaking Point, published by Hummingbird Publishing (UK), is the first urban fantasy novel to place a professional tennis player at the centre of a cross-dimensional conflict. Set during Wimbledon fortnight, the novel follows Rafa, a wildcard entrant to the men’s draw who discovers that the spirit realm runs beneath the grass courts, and that forces beyond human understanding have quietly shaped his entire life.

The Nytherian Universe now spans six complete novels, with recurring characters including the strategist Mismo, the physician Liravelle, and the Grand Wizard Bicu, a core team dispatched by Supreme Leader Gunalp to heal the damage caused by a rogue spirit’s contact with Earth. Away from fiction, Fayaz Shah holds an MBA from the University of Warwick and spent two decades as a strategist in the pharmaceutical industry. He is based in Dubai and writes at fayazshah.com.

Author Bio (Long)

Fayaz Shah is a British urban fantasy author whose six-novel series, set entirely in London, constructs one of contemporary fiction’s most unusual cosmologies: a spirit realm called Nytheria, located beyond the edge of our galaxy, suspended between two ancient nebulae, whose inhabitants have been secretly engaged with Earth for longer than human civilisation has existed.

Shah began building the Nytherian Universe with his debut novel, The Soul Master, and has since completed five further novels in the same universe, a sustained act of creative world-building across approximately 600,000 words of fiction. The central premise connecting all six novels is deceptively simple: a rogue Nytherian spirit crossed the void to Earth, formed alliances with the most destructive elements of human society, and built a portal between worlds that neither side can close alone. The consequences of that single transgression are still unfolding, on Earth’s timeline, centuries later.

The third novel in the series, Breaking Point (Hummingbird Publishing, UK), marks the moment the series enters traditional publishing. It is the first urban fantasy novel to centre on a professional tennis player, Rafa, a wildcard entrant to the Wimbledon men’s draw from a working-class East London background, and to use the culture and pressure of elite sport as the lens through which the supernatural is discovered. The novel opens with Rafa winning the Wimbledon final under conditions he cannot explain, then moves backwards to show how an encounter with a mysterious figure on the London Underground set in motion a chain of events that would lead him from the grass courts of SW19 to a spirit realm one thousand light-years from Earth.

Shah’s fiction is distinguished by a refusal to treat the supernatural as separate from ordinary life. His London is a city of District Line commutes, budget hotel breakfasts, and supermarket checkout queues in which spirits move unseen among the morning rush. The contrast between the mundane reality of his protagonists’ lives and the cosmic scale of the forces acting upon them is the engine of each novel.

Recurring characters across the series include Mismo, an ancient spirit strategist who navigates both worlds with equal fluency; Liravelle, a physician versed in both spirit and human medicine; and Bicu, a Grand Wizard of devastating power and unexpected humour, appointed Prime Executor of Nytheria in Breaking Point. The series’ antagonist, Stomar, represents what the rogue spirit became after centuries of Earth contact, not a villain in the conventional sense, but a philosophy that has abandoned the very laws that made Nytheria possible. Away from fiction, Fayaz Shah holds an MBA from the University of Warwick and spent two decades as a strategist in the global pharmaceutical industry. He is based in Dubai. His author newsletter, Whispers from Nytheria, is published monthly. He writes at fayazshah.com and can be found on X at @shahf1.

One Line pitches for Breaking Point

“A working-class London tennis player wins Wimbledon, then discovers the spirit realm that has been manipulating his life from one thousand light-years away.”

“What if the pressure a professional tennis player feels during a Grand Slam final was not just psychological, but the result of an ancient cosmic conflict playing out beneath the grass courts of Wimbledon?”

Breaking Point – Short Synopsis ( 100 words)

Rafa is a wildcard, in tennis and in the eyes of the spirit realm that has been watching him his entire life. When a mysterious figure begins appearing at his matches, unblinking, impossible to explain, Rafa is drawn into a world hidden beneath London’s streets. A world of spirit beings, rogue forces, and a cosmic conflict that has been building for centuries. A world that knew his name long before he arrived. Breaking Point is an urban fantasy set across London and the spirit realm of Nytheria. A story about sport, sacrifice, and the cost of being exactly the person two worlds have been waiting for.

Breaking Point – Full Synopsis (400 words)

Rafa has won Wimbledon. He stands on Centre Court, trophy in hand, the crowd a wall of noise around him. He has no idea how he survived the fortnight. He remembers a mysterious figure that appeared at every match, a gaunt, unblinking old man whose presence seemed to alter the very texture of his game. He remembers a promise made on the London Underground. He does not yet understand that his victory was not entirely his own. Working backwards from that championship point, Breaking Point traces the months before Wimbledon when Rafa’s career was in freefall. A wildcard to the tournament from a working-class Whitechapel background, he has spent years grinding through the lower tiers of the professional circuit, early losses, empty stands, hotel rooms that blur into each other, sustained only by the knowledge that his parents sacrificed everything to put a racket in his hand. The old man, who calls himself Jomar, first appears at a qualifier in Malaga, then reappears on the Whitechapel Tube, speaking in archaic language and offering Rafa a wish. What seems like a delusion quickly becomes something else entirely: a relationship with a being who has been on Earth for centuries, and who has a connection to Rafa’s own family that Rafa was never meant to know about. As Rafa is drawn deeper into the spirit world, aided by Stacey, a supermarket checkout worker who proves more resilient than anyone expects, and guided by the Nytherian core team of Mismo, Liravelle, and Bicu, he learns that he carries something within him that neither world fully understands: a Lumeheart, a trace of Nytherian energy passed down through his grandmother, who was cured of an incurable illness by a spirit who loved her. The antagonist Stomar, a rogue spirit of terrifying ambition, seeks to use the fractures in the cosmic Balance for dominance over both realms. Stopping him requires what the Nytherian supreme leader Gunalp calls “bridge blood”: a human with Nytherian energy, who can complete the Obsidian Puzzle and seal the breach. Only Rafa can do this. But first, he has a Wimbledon final to win.

Breaking Point – Extended Synopsis (800 words)

Breaking Point opens at the point of apparent triumph, the Wimbledon men’s final, fifth set, championship point, only to trouble the very idea of victory. Rafa stands at the baseline with the trophy almost in reach, yet the roar of the crowd and the authority of the scoreboard recede to the edges of his consciousness. What commands his gaze is a being no one else in the stadium can see: a luminescent figure with blue eyes, stationed in the stands, as it has been at every decisive match of his career. From there, the novel turns backwards, tracing how a wildcard tennis player from Whitechapel came to this moment, and what the journey has exacted from him. Rafa’s story is rooted in class, endurance, and familial sacrifice. His parents have sold their house, their car, and his mother’s jewellery to finance his progress through the unforgiving lower tiers of professional tennis, a world of half-empty stands, qualifying matches in the dry heat of regional Spain, and hotel rooms that consume what little prize money there is. He is talented, perhaps exceptionally so, but talent has not spared him struggle. His confidence is fraying. Into that slow unravelling steps. Jomar is ancient, and his speech carries the weight of something chiselled rather than merely spoken. He appears at Rafa’s matches without explanation, watching with an unblinking intensity that feels less like attention than design. Later, on the Whitechapel Underground platform, he offers Rafa a wish in language that sounds at first like the ravings of a madman, but soon reveals itself as something far stranger. Jomar is a Nytherian spirit who has lived on Earth for centuries, first sent by Supreme Leader Gunalp to search for rare elements. There, he fell in love with Rafa’s grandmother and healed her of an illness no human physician could understand, using Nytherian energy that passed, diluted but undiminished, into her descendants. Rafa bears that inheritance unknowingly. In Nytherian terms, he possesses a Lumeheart. He is the bridge blood, who is the one for whom two worlds have been waiting. The novel’s secondary protagonist is Stacey, introduced as a supermarket checkout worker in Rafa’s neighbourhood, practical, steady, and possessed of the emotional clarity that makes her, when reality begins to bend, the more reliable witness of the two. She becomes Rafa’s companion, then his partner, and ultimately the human presence through which the events of Nytheria can be spoken as well as endured. Through Stacey, the novel finds one of its finest balances: the domestic and the cosmic are not set against one another, but made to coexist. They inhabit the same rain-darkened street, the same Whitechapel evening, the same ordinary life suddenly opened onto the extraordinary. The Nytherian core team, Mismo, strategist; Liravelle, physician; Bicu, Grand Wizard, are familiar figures from the earlier novels, but Breaking Point grants each a fuller resonance. Mismo moves between her small luminescent natural form and the guise of a silver-haired woman in a white coat, passing through London as both guide and colleague. Liravelle, healer of spirit and human alike, acquires a deeper moral complexity as the novel unfolds: she insists that even the rogue spirits aligned with Stomar are not enemies to be destroyed, but patients in need of restoration. Bicu, previously the series’s dry voice of cosmic wisdom, is elevated by the close of the novel to Prime Executor of Nytheria, a shift in office that quietly signals the scale of what is still to come. Stomar, the fire-born leader, is what the original rogue spirit became after centuries of contact with Earth stripped away the laws of Nytheria into which he had been born. Around him, he has gathered a force of other corrupted spirits: those weakened by Earth, those embittered by Gunalp’s authority, those who have tasted human power and found themselves unable to relinquish it. The novel’s climax, unfolding partly in a temporally displaced East London during the Second World War, and partly in Nytheria at the Emerald Palace, turns not upon the collision of equal powers, but upon Rafa’s completion of the Obsidian Puzzle, a Nytherian mechanism that can seal the breach between worlds only through bridge blood. Only he can accomplish it. And the question toward which the novel has been steadily moving is whether a man never asked if he wished to be chosen can accept a destiny laid around him before he was born. The novel closes at the Feast of the Emerald Palace, where mortals and Nytherian spirits sit together as equals, a conclusion deliberately anti-climactic in the most graceful sense. The crisis is resolved not through conquest, but through acknowledgement: of Jomar’s complicated love, of Rafa’s improbable destiny, and of the possibility that the bond between Earth and Nytheria, rebuilt at last on honesty rather than concealment, might become something other than a wound.

Series context

Breaking Point is the third novel in the Nytherian Universe, a six-book series by Fayaz Shah, all set in London, connected by a shared mythology and recurring characters. Each novel stands alone; Breaking Point does not require prior knowledge of its predecessors. However, the universe rewards readers who follow the series: the core team of Nytherian spirits (Mismo, Liravelle, Bicu) deepens across all six books, and the consequences of events in Breaking Point are felt in the subsequent three novels.

The mythology in one paragraph

“Beyond the edge of our galaxy, between two ancient nebulae, exists a spirit realm called Nytheria. Its inhabitants, beings of pure conscious energy, lived in harmony for longer than Earth has existed, governed by a law called the Balance. One rogue spirit crossed the void to Earth, formed alliances with the worst of human nature, and built a portal between worlds that neither side can close alone. The consequences of that single crossing are still playing out on Earth’s timeline — centuries later. Nytheria’s supreme leader, Gunalp, assembled a core team to follow: the strategist Mismo, the physician Liravelle, and the Grand Wizard Bicu. Their mission is ongoing.” The Nytherian Universe — for press use

The only urban fantasy novel centred on a professional tennis player, set during Wimbledon fortnight	INFORMATION
Title	Breaking Point
Author	Fayaz Shah
Publisher	Hummingbird Publishing (UK)
Series	The Nytherian Universe — Novel 3 of 6
Genre	Urban Fantasy
Setting	London (Whitechapel, Wimbledon, East Acton, Forest of Dean, Cornwall); Nytheria
Approximate word count	110,000 words
Protagonist	The only urban fantasy novel centred on a professional tennis player, set during Wimbledon fortnight
Key themes	Identity under pressure; class and sacrifice; destiny vs. choice; cross-dimensional responsibility; redemption
Unique hook	The only urban fantasy novel centred on a professional tennis player; set during Wimbledon fortnight
Author’s other novels	The Soul Master (1), Spirits (Being Flown) (2), The Time Keeper’s Field (4), The Lamplighter’s Debt (5), The Plague Meridian (6)
Author website	https://fayazshah.com
Author X (Twitter)	@shahf1
Author newsletter	Whispers of Nytheria
Author location	Dubai
Review copies	Contact [email protected] or Hummingbird Publishing PR

Q&As for interviews and podcasts

These answers are written in the author’s voice and can be used directly. They may be lightly edited for length. The questions are the ones most commonly asked in author interviews; the answers are specific to Breaking Point and the Nytherian Universe.

Q: Why a tennis player? It’s an unusual choice for urban fantasy.

The pressure of professional sport was the entry point. I wanted a protagonist who already lives in a world where the distance between his best self and his worst self is measured in real time, in front of thousands of people. Rafa is at his most vulnerable during a match, which is exactly when the spirit world can reach him most easily. There’s also the physical detail of tennis that I find compelling: the sound of a forehand winner, the silence before a crucial point, the way a crowd holds its breath collectively. That specific, observable reality felt like the right anchor for something that becomes increasingly cosmic.

Q: Where did the idea of Nytheria come from?

I was thinking about what a spirit realm would have to be like if it were genuinely alien, not constructed from human mythology, not a version of Earth with magical properties, but something that originated in a completely different part of the universe with its own laws and its own history. The idea of placing it between two nebulae came from thinking about what the most isolated position in observable space might look like. And once I had it there, the time problem followed naturally: if it’s that far away, then a brief period of deliberation in Nytheria corresponds to centuries on Earth. That asymmetry generates a lot of the plot.

Q: Jomar is a complicated figure — is he a villain?

He is the most complicated character I have written. He crossed the boundary between worlds, which is a violation of Nytherian law, because he fell in love with a human woman who was dying of something no Earth doctor could treat. He cured her using Nytherian energy, which then passed into her family line and ultimately created the conditions for Rafa to be bridge blood. So his transgression is also the novel’s origin. He spent centuries on Earth subsequently, and some of what he did in that time was genuinely harmful. But the moment I gave him his apology to Rafa at the feast, ‘Everything I did, however misguided, came from a place of wanting to preserve life’, I knew he wasn’t a villain. He was someone who made a catastrophic choice out of love and spent the rest of his existence paying for it.

Q: Why is London the right city for this universe?

London compresses time in a way that makes the spirit world plausible. You can stand in Smithfield Market, which has been a site of human activity since before the Romans named the city, and feel the weight of that history in the actual ground. The city has been building on itself for two thousand years, which means there are layers of geography, of architecture, of culture, where the past is literally beneath the present. That compression is exactly what makes the veil thin. And practically, London is a city of strangers. The District Line at rush hour is full of people who will not make eye contact. It is the perfect environment for spirits to move through unnoticed.

Q: What does Stacey bring to the novel that Rafa cannot?

Reliability. Rafa is extraordinary; he has the Lumeheart, he’s the bridge blood, he’s the person two worlds have been waiting for, which means he’s also the least reliable narrator of his own experience. He keeps doubting what he sees and dismissing what he knows. Stacey doesn’t have the Nytherian energy; she has no particular reason to be involved. Which means when she accepts what is happening, it is a genuine choice, not a response to an internal compulsion. She grounds the novel in ordinary human decision-making. And she has an emotional intelligence that Rafa, for all his athletic brilliance, genuinely lacks. She is often more useful in any given situation than he is.