Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there-the end of the book. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly?-No. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. I could read another thousand pages of this world and not grow tired of it. Samatar’s world-building is breathtaking, but the book’s real magic is in the way it visits storytelling as an act of creation and of grief, of abundance and loss. In order to escape, he has to give something precious to both of them.

The dead woman torments him at night while the factions toy with him by day.

Soon, he becomes enchanted by the city and haunted by the woman, caught up in a political battle between Olondrian religious factions. Author Sofia Samatar Publisher Small Beer Press Copyright 2013 Collection Fiction Buy this book BookshopĪs he travels to Olondria to sell the family harvest, Jevick meets a young woman on the verge of death.

A stranger in olondria