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Ann Leckie

The Raven Tower Paperback – 26 February 2019

by Ann Leckie (Author)

564 ratings

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Listen. A god is speaking.

My voice echoes through the stone of your master's castle. This castle where he finds his uncle on his father's throne. You want to help him. You cannot.

You are the only one who can hear me.

You will change the world.

A triumph of the imagination, THE RAVEN TOWER is the first fantasy novel by Ann Leckie, New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards.

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Product details

Publisher : Orbit; 1st edition (26 February 2019)
Language : English
Paperback : 400 pages
ISBN-10 : 0356507009
ISBN-13 : 978-0356507002
Dimensions : 15.2 x 3.6 x 23.2 cm

Customer Reviews:
564 ratings

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Review

I've been reading fantasy my whole life. After all these years, it's a delight to read something so different, so wonderful and strange -- Patrick Rothfuss, author of THE NAME OF THE WIND

A powerhouse epic of humans and gods at war, deeply imagined and profoundly thrilling. There are echoes of Shakespeare and Le Guin in The Raven Tower, but its strange dark brilliance could only have come from Ann Leckie -- Lev Grossman

A gripping story that's one part mystery, one part a new history of the world, The Raven Tower is an incredible fantasy, told by one of the most unique voices I've had the privilege of reading -- S. A. Chakraborty

The Raven Tower is a unique, intricate fantasy set in a fascinating world of gods who are at once formidable and vulnerable. Original and powerful - I loved it. Highly recommended for fans of N. K. Jemisin or Guy Gavriel Kay -- Django Wexler

Earthsea's elegance meets Sanderson's clever magic in this talon-sharp saga of divinity and revenge. Ann Leckie is unstoppable -- Seth Dickinson

Review

Excellent

Thrilling, out-of-this world stuff

A novel that will thrill you like the page-turner it is, but stick with you for a long time afterwards

A fast-paced, moving and intellectually satisfying story of love and vengeance . . . It's by turns thrilling, moving and awe-inspiring

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Customer reviews

5 star		52%
4 star		27%
3 star		14%
2 star		4%
1 star		3%

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Top reviews from Australia

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Korat87

Powerful, intriguing story with a fascinating protagonist.

Reviewed in Australia on 12 March 2019

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Absolutely splendid. However, if the elements you enjoyed in the Ancillary series were the space opera, sci-fi setting, AI), you may want to look elsewhere. For me, the most moving features of the Ancillary series are present here- spare, powerful prose, flawed human characters and at the centre, a unique perspective I’ve returned to time and time again. I have reread the final lines at least ten times.

One can call it poetic fantasy if we must put it in a box, but I recommend reading a sample first if you’re unsure. For me, Leckie is one of those authors I buy without reading a review.

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Jarrad

Unsatisfying

Reviewed in Australia on 29 May 2019

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Knowing Ann Leckie I was going into this execting unique story-telling, intriguing characters and world-building and that ticked every box.

My main issue with this story is that it was building and building to a point in the story and everything was coming together and... it was over. A decent story leading up to a big moment in the plot and the story ended. Such a shame.

So my main take on this is unsatisfying.

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Kerry Muir

Disappointed

Reviewed in Australia on 11 March 2019

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I am such a fan of the Ancillary series that I pre-ordered this book and waited with bated breath only to find I really did not enjoy it at all.

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David Maxwell

Introspective and unique story of a god

Reviewed in Australia on 10 March 2020

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A pretty non-traditional fantasy story. I would like to say it’s about a guy uncovering the mysteries of his town, but it’s really not – it’s about a local god. Set in a world where small gods are born and their power depends on the worship humans give them. A somewhat divisive book amongst traditional religious types due to the very strong pagan mythology, but hey, it’s fantasy. Half the story is present-day, from the perspective of a human. The other, and far more interesting, half is from the perspective of one of the local gods (a boulder) who is hundreds of millenia old. The genius of the book is the voice of that god, the perspective of something that remembers millions of years sitting at the bottom of an ocean and for whom human history is a small but important footnote. That’s a lot of words to say not much, but it is very strange, very introspective and quite novel.
8/10

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Top reviews from other countries

Tetleynick

Maybe a bit too clever

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 March 2019

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This is a hard book to get into and one that I struggled to like.
It is written well as you would expect from this author, but the style, intermingling an origin story with another storyline just didn't catch my imagination. That is probably more an indictment of my taste than the author's style, and I would never criticise someone for trying something a little bit different.
I have read a review which compares the plot to Hamlet and I can't really disagree with that, and like Hamlet I found it very hard to sympathise with any of the characters.
This is a very clever book and I think the author knows that, but for me it is a bit too clever for it's own good.

14 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Hamlet refracted through the Iliad

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 March 2019

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I expected much, and was not disappointed: It’s been a while since I felt so thoroughly satisfied by a book. Leckie deftly intertwines two plots, one in the book’s present, the other in its past, resolving both at the end perfectly. The plot is Hamlet—though Leckie prefers Horatio to the prince, and, as one might expect from her previous gender-bending,does some fun things with Ophelia and Gertrude. The classic is refracted through the lenses of mythology and comparative anthropology, to delightful effect, and the narration moves at a fine old clip and continually engages. Horatio—excuse me, Eolo—is a thoroughly sympathetic protagonist (of one plot, at least—the other has a different actor) which I find rather more engaging than all the grimdark nasties who are all the rage. This is a very clever book but also a very readable one, though like its sources it ends in tragedy.

11 people found this helpful

Malcolm R

Refreshingly different

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 May 2019

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A very different take on the sword and sorcery genre though there is little of the former with lots of the latter from gods rather than wizards or sorcerers. The story is related by a god partly as a history of itself and other gods, human history and the “present day” through the eyes of Eolo sidekick of the heir to the “Raven’s Lease” with the story revolving around the succession to that post. I enjoyed the clever otherworldliness of it but it may disappoint some owing to its very literary style and the relative lack of blood and violence which is replaced by intrigue and mystery. It ends with some things unresolved, I hope at least one sequel will follow.

5 people found this helpful

Lola Givenchy

Ancillary Justice: the fantasy version

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 February 2020

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Ann Leckie definitely has two central themes that drive her work. The first is an extremely powerful, non-human entity which becomes fascinated with a human being over whom it watches and whom it protects. The second is her tendency to make central characters gender-neutral, or non-binary.

So it's the Ancillary books once again, though treated in a very different way. I enjoyed them and I mostly enjoyed this. It is absolutely not for everyone; it's extremely original, it's a slow burn, I couldn't quite take the cloud of mosquitoes seriously, but what I love about Leckie's writing is that she will get there when she damn well gets there; it's the opposite of cheap thrillers with their endless silly cliffhangers and short, easy-to-read sentences. Some parts are blindingly obvious - it's clear where the Lease is almost immediately - but in compensation, the payoff, and the revelation of where and in what situation the narrator has been all this time, I found amazingly moving. I still find it quite painful to think about, which truly is a feat.

Set against that, however, is Leckie's second theme. It's no spoiler to say that the human hero, Eolo, is a transman - we find that out immediately. Fine, who cares? What I very much disliked was his repudiation of his sex. "I'm not a woman", he snaps, and later throws a hissy fit at the prospect of having to enter a women-only space. There is clear self-hate here that's taken for granted, and I found that very distressing. Here's a woman writing a book with a female protagonist who hates being female, and that's never even discussed. Why on earth not? Eolo doesn't want any body changes, he's a tough fighter and he mainly likes having sex with women. Eolo sounds like a butch lesbian to me.

There's a line, from a woman who's attracted to him, where she (in a rather annoyingly oblique way) seems to be saying that IDing as the opposite sex is not okay in their society. But there's absolutely nothing saying that Eolo wouldn't be accepted as a woman warrior and lover of women, and indeed Eolo refuses an offer to "make him so he could be so he is" (on page 3, no spoilers), snapping that "I already am who I am". Well, okay then Eolo, you're a biological woman and saying you're not is a big fat lie. Had the offer continued with "So you'll be safe" or "so they won't run you out of town", that would have been very different; but it didn't.

Eolo simply hates being a woman, and it's taken for granted that this is... okay? Normal? This is a really odd perspective from a female author, and as a female reader, it's extremely alienating. I hope Leckie will interrogate her own perspective on this in future books with the same attention which in this she applied to how power functions.

One person found this helpful

Kindleworm Dot Com

All very good except the gender thing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 August 2020

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No idea how i came across this, but it sounded rather good so i added it to my wish list and when it got put on sale for only 99p, i didn’t need asking twice.

And for 99p i definitely got an incredible bargain.

I’ve no idea why this is listed in science fiction on Amazon, i’d definitely put it squarely in the grimdark fantasy section. I suppose i may be getting my genres completely misconstrued, but i don’t think i am.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a good bit of grimdark fantasy then this should be right up your alley. Who are the good and the bad in this and are they even aware that they are and why? The baddies, although doing what they do for completely nefarious reasons, are actually doing the good thing; while the goodies, thinking they’re being all altruistic and everything, turn out to be on the baddies’ side. And it’s all wound into a very well written story.

My only little winge is that Eolo’s gender thing is rather ambiguous and confusing and i think this could have been better defined. At the end of the book i’m still not sure what gender Eolo actually is: cis, trans or otherwise. Another character also mentions an aunt that had a gender thing going on, but again, no real information as to what. I just completely failed to see what purpose having a main character — and another character who wasn’t part of the story whatsoever — with ambiguous genders served: other then being a poor attempt by the writer to include someone with these issues in order to get some woke cred. Wouldn’t it be nice if we’re going to have characters with gender issues, dysphoria, trans, non-binary, etc., that they were made relevant to the story and explored further with a view to educating the ignorant masses on these issues while also helping and supporting those who have to deal with these issues in real life? A great example of a writer that did such a thing would be Jason Segel, working with Eve Lindley, in the series Dispatches from Elsewhere: definitely a must watch before you read another book if you haven’t watched it already.

Other than my little winge this is a great book with great characters, well written and it really plays with the idea of gods and how gods get, keep and use their power over people. We can see in our own world how a certain god has been allowed to overwhelm other gods and how this has ultimately turned the whole world into a ****hole of ecological disaster with a global plague while in a mass extinction event. This is what happens when you worship a god whose clergy tells you that you don’t have to care about this world because said god has got something better for you when you die — just keep breeding like flies and ****ing the planet up, Armageddon will soon be upon us and the pious shall have their rapture.

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