The Knight
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Gene Wolfe |
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| Series | Book 1 of The Wizard Knight |
| Publisher | Tor Books |
| Honors | |
| A young man in his teens is transported from our world to a magical realm that contains seven levels of reality. Very quickly transformed by magic into a grown man of heroic proportions, he takes the name Abel and sets out on a quest to find the sword that has been promised to him, a sword he will get from a dragon, the one very special blade that will help him fulfill his life ambition to become a knight and a true hero. Inside, however, Abel remains a boy, and he must grow in every sense to survive the dangers and delights that lie ahead in encounters with… | |
A young man in his teens is transported from our world to a magical realm that contains seven levels of reality. Very quickly transformed by magic into a grown man of heroic proportions, he takes the name Abel and sets out on a quest to find the sword that has been promised to him, a sword he will get from a dragon, the one very special blade that will help him fulfill his life ambition to become a knight and a true hero.
Inside, however, Abel remains a boy, and he must grow in every sense to survive the dangers and delights that lie ahead in encounters with giants, elves, wizards, and dragons.
Gene Wolfe is one of the most widely praised masters of SF and fantasy. He is the winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Nebula Award, twice, the World Fantasy Award, twice, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Fantasy Award, and France’s Prix Apollo. His popular successes include the four-volume classic The Book of the New Sun.
With this new series, Wolfe not only surpasses all the most popular genre writers of the last three decades, he takes on the legends of the past century, in a work that will be favorably compared with the best of J. R. R. Tolkien, E. R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake, and T. H. White. This is a book—and a series—for the ages, from perhaps the greatest living writer in (or outside) the fantasy genre.
Honors
Reviews
Barnes and Noble
The Knight, the first installment in Gene Wolfe’s epic Wizard Knight duology, is a storytelling tour de force narrated by a teenage boy who has been mysteriously transported from modern-day America to a magical realm of interconnected worlds inhabited by elves, giants, and dragons.
After meeting a beautiful elf queen named Disiri and being transformed into a powerful knight, Sir Able of the High Heart (that’s the name an old crone gave him) sets out—armed only with his honor, intelligence, and newfound strength—on a quest to find a mythical sword guarded by a ferocious dragon.
In a reality saturated with enchantment, the heroic Able is still just a frightened boy inside, struggling to understand the strange world around him. As he learns more about the machinations of the magical realms, he begins to grow into the role of a heroic knight. His code of honor leads him into many adventures—wrestling an ogre, storming a giant fortress, climbing into the Mountain of Fire to save a friend, etc.—but his ultimate quest to find the mythical sword and defeat the dragon is never forgotten. Reminiscent of Alan Dean Foster’s Journeys of the Catechist saga as well as classics like Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Wolfe’s newest is fantastical fiction at its very best. The Knight is an absolute masterpiece of imagination—a compelling read for fantasy fans of all ages. —Paul Goat Allen
