Or perhaps it’s a seat in a garden, or even a square perhaps you’ve been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. 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 had, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. The section I’m about to quote is lengthy, but worth it: Samatar’s prose is elegant and melodious, and its smooth flow is consistent throughout the rise and fall of action. It’s evident how much work went into choosing and arranging every single word and sentence. In doing so, Jevick will need to bridge the gap between Tinimavet and Olondria-their cultures, their words, and their stories.Ī Stranger Olondria is an exceptionally literary fantasy, and by that I mean this is a book where the vast majority of its power and grace comes from the writing itself.

The only way for Jevick to free himself of the ghost is to write her story. To rid himself of the ghost, Jevick seeks the help of a priestly cult dedicated to the goddess of Love and Death, and so becomes caught up in a political and religious struggle he neither knew about nor cared. All goes perfectly until the raucous celebration known as the Feast of Birds, for upon its end, Jevick wakes up to find the ghost of a young woman from his homeland has attached itself to him, a ghost that torments him with vivid, agonizing visions almost nightly. Following his father’s death, Jevick is finally able to journey to the land he has studied and dreamed of, eager to immerse himself in all he has read about. Jevick, whose homeland does not possess a written version of their language, let alone books, drinks up the words written by famed Olondrian writers provided to him by his tutor, who also teaches him the language. Far across the sea is the country of Olondria, famed for its beauty, culture, and its prolificity of books.

Jevick grows up the son of a prosperous pepper-merchant and his two wives on the island of Tinimavet, one of the Tea Islands, where people take much stock in the power of spirits and gods, good and bad luck.

A stranger in olondria summary