Books

Terrys of the Fantasy World

Straken: High Druid of Shannara
Terry Brooks
Random House Publishing Group; September 2005

Young Pen Ohmsford undertakes a nearly impossible mission: he must retrieve the High Druid from exile in the otherworldly realm known as the Forbidding. His is not the only challenge, for a beleaguered army must rally to meet a far more powerful foe, and the world itself must prepare for the arrival of a demonic horror. Brooks concludes his latest trilogy, begun with Jarka Ruus and Tanequil and set in the same world as his many Shannara novels, with a story of courage and daring featuring a new generation of heroes.

Chainfire
Terry Goodkind
Tor Books; January 2005

With Wizard's First Rule and seven subsequent masterpieces, Terry Goodkind has thrilled readers worldwide with the unique sweep of his storytelling. Now Goodkind returns with a new novel of Richard and Kahlan, the beginning of a sequence of three novels that will bring their epic story to its culmination. After being gravely injured in battle, Richard awakes to discover Kahlan missing. To his disbelief, no one remembers the woman he is frantically trying to find. Worse, no one believes that she really exists, or that he was ever married. Alone as never before, he must find the woman he loves more than life itself if she is even still alive--if she was ever even real.

Thud!
Terry Pratcher
HarperCollins Publishers; September 2005

Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch will be damned if he lets anyone disturb his city's always tentative peace and that includes a rabble-rousing dwarf from the sticks who's been stirring up trouble on the eve of the anniversary of one of Discworld's most infamous historical events. Centuries earlier, in a hellhole called Koom Valley, trolls met dwarfs in bloody combat. Though nobody's quite sure why they fought or who actually won, each species still bears the cultural scars and views the other with simmering animosity. Lately, an influential dwarf, Grag Hamcrusher, has been fomenting unrest among Ankh-Morpork's more diminutive citizens. And it doesn't help matters when the pint-size provocateur is discovered beaten to death with a troll club lying nearby. Vimes knows the well-being of his city depends on his ability to solve the Hamcrusher homicide. But there's more than one corpse waiting for him in the vast mine network the dwarfs have been excavating beneath Ankh-Morpork's streets. A deadly puzzle is pulling Sam Vimes deep into the muck and mire of superstition, hatred, and fear and perhaps all the way to Koom Valley itself.

Compiled by: Sanyat Sattar

Copyright (R) thedailystar.net 2005