The Realm of the Elderlings

Some histories are told from a great height, kingdoms shuffled like game pieces on a board. This one is told from inside a single scarred and faithful heart. The Realm of the Elderlings is Robin Hobb's world of the Six Duchies and the Rain Wilds — a fading royal line, dragons that most take for old legend, and two despised magics: the Skill, which binds mind to mind and can burn a man hollow, and the Wit, the beast-bond that men are hanged and burned for keeping. Sixteen novels gather into five sequences, and they are best walked in the order they were written. It opens with the Farseer Trilogy — Assassin's Apprentice, Royal Assassin, Assassin's Quest — the boyhood of FitzChivalry Farseer, a king's bastard raised quietly to the assassin's trade. Then it turns away entirely, south to Bingtown's proud trading families and their living, remembering ships, in the Liveship Traders Trilogy. It returns to Fitz and his masked, needling friend the Fool in the Tawny Man Trilogy; widens into the Rain Wild Chronicles, where crippled dragons and their outcast keepers seek a drowned Elderling city; and closes, unforgettably, with Fitz and the Fool. What sets it apart is nearness. Hobb writes mostly in close first person, slow and unhurried, and asks you to love people before she lets the world hurt them — which it does, patiently, and at length. This is fantasy about loyalty, aging, animal grief and the cost of duty rather than clashing armies. Begin at the beginning: Assassin's Apprentice. The three trilogies about Fitz form one long life told end to end, and the payoff of the final volumes is earned only by those who started as a lonely boy in the stables at Buckkeep.