the witness for the dead by katherine addison

Quietly and carefully paced to allow its best elements to shine, anchored with a compelling and wonderfully-drawn main character, The Witness for the Dead is a masterful confluence of elements, as comforting and human as it is fantastic and, occasionally, dark. Like so many nascent sub-genres, though, the term is mostly inspired by the excellence of a few key authors, and I found my skepticism hard to remember while reading Katherine Addison’s latest. Not of its goals, but of its existence as a movement: despite many jubilant explanations of the term, it never seems to quite cohere as a genre or even an aesthetic, as critics have pointed out. Within THE CHRONICLES OF OSRETH The Goblin Emperor The Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy The Witness for the Dead The Grief of Stones The Tomb of Dragons At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.Hopepunk is a genre I’m occasionally skeptical of.

Katherine Addison has created a fantastic world for these books – wide and deep and true. No matter his own background with the imperial house, Celehar will stand with the commoners, and possibly find a light in the darkness. Celehar’s skills now lead him out of the quiet and into a morass of treachery, murder, and injustice. It is his duty use that ability to resolve disputes, to ascertain the intent of the dead, to find the killers of the murdered. As a Witness for the Dead, he can, sometimes, speak to the recently dead: see the last thing they saw, know the last thought they had, experience the last thing they felt. He lives modestly, but his decency and fundamental honesty will not permit him to live quietly.

He has not escaped from politics, but his position gives him the ability to serve the common people of the city, which is his preference. Now Celehar lives in the city of Amalo, far from the Court though not exactly in exile. The favor of the Emperor is a dangerous coin. He lost his place as a retainer of his cousin the former Empress, and made far too many enemies among the many factions vying for power in the new Court. Thara Celehar found the truth, though it did him no good to discover it. I loved it.' -John Scalzi Katherine Addison returns to the glittering world she created for her beloved novel, The Goblin Emperor, in this stand-alone sequel Locus Award Finalist! Mythopoeic Award Finalist! When the young half-goblin emperor Maia sought to learn who had set the bombs that killed his father and half-brothers, he turned to an obscure resident of his father’s Court, a Prelate of Ulis and a Witness for the Dead.

'At once intimate and literally operatic, it's everything I love about Katherine Addison's writing, in ways I didn't know to expect.

The witness for the dead by katherine addison