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  • Stonewielder

  • Epic Fantasy: Malazan Empire
  • Written by: Ian C Esslemont
  • Narrated by: John Banks
  • Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
  • 4.8 out of 5 stars (17 ratings)

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Stonewielder

Written by: Ian C Esslemont
Narrated by: John Banks
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Publisher's Summary

Greymane believed he'd outrun his past. With his school for swordsmanship in Falar, he was looking forward to a quiet life, although his colleague, Kyle, wasn't as enamoured with life outside the mercenary company, the Crimson Guard. However, it seems it is not so easy for an ex-Fist of the Malazan Empire to disappear, especially one under sentence of death from that same Empire.

For there is a new Emperor on the throne of Malaz, and he is dwelling on the ignominy that is the Empire's failed invasion of the Korel subcontinent. In the vaults beneath Unta, the Imperial capital, lie the answers to that disaster. And out of this buried history surfaces the name Stonewielder.

In Korel, Lord Protector Hiam, commander of the Stormguard, faces the potential annihilation of all that he holds dear. With few remaining men and a crumbling stone wall that has seen better days, he confronts an ancient enemy: the seaborne Stormriders have returned.

Religious war also threatens these lands. The cult of the Blessed Lady, which had stood firm against the Riders for millennia, now seeks to eradicate its rivals. And as chaos looms, a local magistrate investigating a series of murders suddenly finds himself at the heart of a far more ancient and terrifying crime - one that has tainted an entire land....

Stonewielder is an enthralling new chapter in the epic story of a thrillingly imagined world.

©2010 Ian C. Esslemont (P)2016 Random House Audiobooks

What listeners say about Stonewielder

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Great book!

The Malazan story is just epic! One for the ages I tell yeeee! Second to none in this realm.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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An Epic Story

This is a great sequel to Return of The Crimson Guard, and follows a lot of the characters and plots after the conclusion of that book. There are a few things left over, but it gives a great end to the tales of the Empire while the rest of these novels and the Book of the Fallen focus on events elsewhere in the world afterwards.

The main complaint I have is the same I had in Return of the Crimson Guard. Esslemont seems to want to give you at least a little taste of each character each chapter, so he jarringly jumps between plots and locations, when he could have just written more shorter chapters instead. I think this would have been a little easier to digest if he alternated between the Malazans and maybe the Storm Wall (since there is a lot of juxtaposition there), and then other events (Ivanr, Bakune, Kiska, the Crimson Guard, etc). I didn’t find that the chapters were even that thematically linked to justify clumping all the plots together this way. The last few chapters do a good job of wrapping everything together though.

Narration has been better than the last two, which weren’t even that bad to start. It isn’t quite on the same level as Michael Page in the Book of the Fallen, but is still well above passing. There’s still a little issue with the narrator having to guess on the fly what is supposed to be inner monologue and what is the narrative summary, but it’s gotten a lot better since the last novel.

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