Product Description

Robert Jordan's epic fantasy saga The Wheel of Time is now firmly established as a classic of the genre and a world-wide bestseller. Now the series continues with the eagerly-awaited tenth volume . Rand al'Thor, the Dragon Reborn, must fight on against the Dark One in a stuggle that has drawn an entire world into its vortex - claiming the souls of friends and enemies alike. He has cleansed the taint of madness from the male half of the True Source, so may now draw on its power as a weapon of awesome potential. This could tip the balance in a perilous battle against evil as Rand must gamble with himself at stake. He cannot be sure which of his allies are really enemies - even among lifelong companions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2805 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 832 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
With Crossroads of Twilight, Jordan's gargantuan fantasy sequence The Wheel of Time reaches its tenth huge volume and hits some of the consequences of its own sheer scale. Jordan is running so many story lines--the struggle with the covert agents of evil, the creation of a male magic that is not polluted, the war with magic-using dragon-riders from across the sea, the adventures of a travelling circus--that he has to spend almost all of this book just keeping us in touch with the movements of his characters and how they are getting on.

This is a book with a fair amount of incident, but nothing you could really call a climax. One of Jordan's strengths has always been his ability to send things off at interesting and imaginative tangents, revealing that his is a stranger world than we have begun to know--there is not enough of that here, and rather too much in the way of confrontations and kidnappings and dilemmas of conscience that recapitulate things he has done before. His decent, lumbering "grey" style means that there are no moments when the writing thrills us either--this is a book for those who have committed to Jordan's sequence for the long haul rather than one for new readers to sample. --Roz Kaveney

Review
'Jordan has come to dominate the world that Tolkien began to reveal' NEW YORK TIMES 'Epic in every sense' SUNDAY TIMES 'On very rare occasions, very talented storytellers create worlds that are beyond fantasy; worlds that become realities. Robert Jordan has' MORGAN LLYWELYN 'A powerful vision of good and evil' ORSON SCOTT CARD

About the Author
Robert Jordan was born in 1948 in Charleston, where he lives with his wife Harriet. He is a graduate of the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, with a degree in physics. He served 2 tours in Vietnam. His hobbies inc. hunting, fishing, sailing, poker, chess, pool and pipe collecting.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating insights into seating arrangements at meetings
I rapt with Jordan's rich and complex description of the seating arrangements at a meeting of the Hall in Exile. Many pages were devoted to these seating arrangements about who sat near who and who was surprised, unnerved or unaware of these arrangements. I'm sure after several more books of trivial facts I will learn who these people are and why their seating arrangements are so important.

I was equally rapt about the many pages devoted to the adjustment of clothing such as shawls and skirts.

Just as interesting were the chapters on characters sitting around wondering what to do next. Almost as interesting as the large parties of old and new characters travelling to unknown destinations on an unknown timetable for unknown reasons.

There is a major mistep in this book where the tracks of a group of hell hounds appear. Fortunately the creatures were not sighted and did not go near any characters narrowly avoiding the jarring intrusion of action or suspense into an otherwise pleasant book.

Some people have claimed this book is a setup for book 11. This is incorrect. The blurb on the back cover of this book is a setup for book 11, the contents of this book do not really expand on the blurb and are not a requirement for moving on to book 11.

A Long Slow Road
Well, I am a big fan of WoT and have read and re-read the series several times. The standard of writing in Crossroads of Twilight is of Jordan's usual high quality with descriptions, characters, and places all vividly portrayed in his unique style.
However, while all of this is enjoyable, unfortuately nothing of note happens in this book. I mean, absolutely nothing. The one major event of the story occurs on the very last page, leaving the reader hanging in a dreary Empire Strikes Back kind of way.
I had heard rumors that Jordan planned on finishing the series in 12 books but if he keeps up at this pace, it will never end!
I will keep reading as long as Jordan keeps writing but we may all be old and gray by the time he ever gets round to gathering together all of the threads, old and new, he keeps weaving.

Getting to be like Arsenal in the 70s
If anyone has read 'Fever Pitch' by Nick Hornby (an excellent book, I'd give it at least 4 stars were I reviewing it) there's a section in there where he's describing his feelings as an Arsenal fan in the 70s, when Arsenal were not bad enough to get relegated yet not good enough to win anything. He describes the resulting stasis as being terrible. I'm not a football fan yet, reading the 'Wheel of Time' series, I know what he means.

This book has been long awaited by anyone who's read the last nine, something Jordan must be aware of. Even the most diehard fans (and I'm one of them) must be wanting Jordan to get on with it, to advance the plot a little. This book doesn't do that. There are sections dealing with Perrin, Mat, Egwene, Elayne and (briefly) Rand himself, but none of them really take the story anywhere. Perrin starts out on a search & rescue mission for Faile and by the end of the book he's still on a search & rescue mission for Faile, Mat is trying to leave Seanchan territory and still is at the end of the book, the siege of Tar Valon and the choosing of the Queen of Andor go precisely nowhere and Rand does nothing of significance. 680 pages and hardly anything happens.

To be fair, it does seem, in all the above cases, as if something is about to happen (in fact the Egwene and Mat storylines do have significant events happen right at the end, but even these just set up a situation for the next volume to deal with), so volume 11 may well have a lot of action in it. But I would have liked some here, I've been waiting over a year after all. Even if it meant the book being longer, I don't mind 1100 page novels, in fact I quite like them.

And this is more disappointing because the prologue, which I downloaded from Kazaa a few months back (can you believe that Jordan got upset because people like me refused to pay twice for the same piece of writing?) did have lots of tantalising hints of action. It seemed that a counterattack was going to be launched on the Seanchan and the Black Tower was going to be split. But none of these promising plotlines come to fruition. The possible split in the Black tower is mentioned once and the counterattack on the Seanchan not at all.

Like most people who've read the other nine I can't see any way to stop now, I've invested too much in it. And there is some interesting character development and some slight movement on some sub plots. However for £18 and a wait of nearly 2 years I had expected more. But, like Nick Hornby and Arsenal in the seventies, I'm stuck with what's dished out to me and can see no way out of it.

Jordan has said that he hopes to finish by volume 12, something I can't see happening given how little happened here. But I still hope he'll recover his earlier style, the interesting and excellent books that drew me into this series. Hopefully he will recover and start to write decently again. A bit like Arsenal in the 80s.