Recently voted the greatest fantasy of all time, after The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is an extraordinary epic, set a million years in the future, on an Earth transformed in mysterious and wondrous ways, in a time when our present culture is no longer even a memory. Severian, the central character, is a torturer, exiled from his guild after falling in love with one of his victims, and journeying to the distant city of Thrax, armed with his ancient executioner's sword, Terminus Est. This edition contains the first two volumes of this four volume novel, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the ConciliatorOne of the most acclaimed "science fantasies" ever, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980-83) is a long, magical novel in four volumes. Shadow and Claw contains the first two, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, which respectively won the World Fantasy and Nebula awards.

This is the first-person narrative of Severian the lowly apprentice torturer, blessed and cursed with a photographic memory, whose travels lead him through the marvels of far-future "Urth", and who--as revealed near the beginning--eventually becomes his land's sole ruler or Autarch. On the surface it's a colourful story with all the classic ingredients: growing up, adventure, sex, betrayal, murder, exile, battle, monsters and mysteries to be solved. (Only well into book two do we realise what saved Severian's life in chapter one.) For lovers of literary allusions, they're here in plenty: a Dickensian cemetery scene, a torture-engine from Kafka, a wonderful library out of Borges and familiar fables changed by aeons of retelling. Wolfe evokes a chilly sense of time's vastness, with an age-old, much restored painting of a golden-visored "knight" who is an astronaut standing on the Moon; an ancient citadel of metal towers which are grounded spacecraft. Even the Sun is senile and dying, and so Urth needs a New Sun.

The Book of the New Sun is almost heart-breakingly good, full of riches and subtleties that improve with each rereading. It is Gene Wolfe's masterpiece and strongly recommended. --David Langford

Genre: Fantasy