Product Description

In the kingdom of Crotheny, two young girls are playing in the tangled gardens of the sacred city of the dead when they stumble upon the unknown crypt of a legendary ancestral queen.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #99107 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 552 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Briar King opens Greg Keyes' four-volume fantasy sequence "Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone". Besides being highly readable, the novel offers an intriguingly tangled plot and back-story that rises well above the black-and-white simplicities of commercial fantasy.

A prelude of magical battle and hard-won victory over hated slave masters strikes a note of doom as it's suggested that the coming Golden Age is already poisoned by misuse of magic at its founding. Next, a much later historian's note records that "In the year 2,223 E, the age of Everon came to an abrupt and terrible end." This is the year in which the main narrative begins.

It's a time of late-medieval kingdoms, with credible political tension and devious diplomacy. In the kingdom of Crotheny, something is very wrong in the royal forest--signalled by the forest warden's sighting of a "greffyn". Both like and unlike the griffin of myth, this creature's mere presence poisons streams with a deadly contamination that lingers and can be passed on by touch.

Something is rotten in the Church, too, where a gifted novice monk finds himself translating ancient, unspeakable texts that should have been left in decent obscurity. Other kinds of wrongness fester at court, with shifting tensions among the mostly likeable members of a dysfunctional royal family, increasing political pressure from outside and genuinely shocking treason within. When a knight of the Queen's most trusted personal guard abruptly tries to kill her, there seems to be no safety anywhere. Not even in the well-defended "coven" or convent to which the youngest, most wilful princess is despatched to be trained as an assassin-nun.

As a variety of neatly-drawn characters pursue personal feuds, vendettas, love affairs, comic pratfalls, escape plans and paths to advancement, there are repeated hints that the land itself--defiled by sinister rituals of desecration--is dying. The greffyn and the appalling Briar King of prophecy seem to be symptoms rather than the real disease.

The Briar King is a strong start to what promises to be a gripping fantasy sequence. --David Langford

Alien Online, September 2003
...the most exciting and brilliant opener to a series for a long, long while...

Derry Journal, September 2003
Highly individual fantasy.

Customer Reviews

Well worth your time!
From a somewhat slow beginning (where I also struggled slightly with the way some characters speak), The Briar King very quickly built up in intensity. I think it's because the beginning was rather cliché. The Good Guys finally overcoming the Bad Guys, with a bit of back-history about the struggle, is nothing we haven't seen before. In fact, a lot in The Briar King seems at first rather conventional. Skip forward two millennia and you have the kingdom on the brink of war, the young knight with a destiny, the young princess with a destiny, the young priest with a destiny (and lots of outdated maps) and various other characters running around unaware of their probably imminent death.

But The Briar King is much, much better than that. It will sound silly, but it was the characterisation of the characters that really made them stand out. Having a princess in a fantasy novel isn't unusual. Having a non-spoiled princess I liked, with an interesting story and journey, is. And that's pretty much Keyes' style: the subtle twists on more traditional fantasy elements, and the clever re-imagining in a way that makes it truly his own.

I really liked the way Keyes wove bits of folklore -- some with references to our own world, such as The Briar King (maybe The Green Man?), and some invented -- into the story. There are also mentions of a Virgenya as the story starts, and a great queen, Elizabeth Dare, in a cleverly played hint of an alternate reality Elizabethan Earth. As the book starts, 2000 years after the great war of the prologue, the Church (singular) frowns very much upon heathen worshipping -- but, and this is really cool, accepts that other gods/powers existed, and has incorporated the worthy into the church theology as saints and demi-gods. Faneways can be walked that allow the novice to receive some kind of power -- different for each person -- from the saints' sedos -- a residuary of power that gradually fades. Even within the Church, it's acknowledged that not all the saints are necessarily "good" -- and some rather dubious characters, including a cabal of killer-priests are endowed with powers.

With all that folklore, very few believe The Briar King actually exists. A theme of the novel is the search for knowledge -- knowledge that hasn't been corrupted by time, or over-zealous priests -- and it becomes very clear that the folklore has rather more than a nugget of truth in it.

This was an engaging novel, fun, quick-witted, and realistically imagined. While there were some flaws, The Briar King is still one of the best High Fantasy novels I've read for years. I'm hoping the same will apply to the sequels...

Excellent, gripping opening to an interesting epic fantasy series.
Greg Keyes first came to prominence a decade or so ago, with his Age of Unreason quartet and his duology consisting of The Waterborn and The Blackgod. There was some concern that spec fic had lost a very promising author to the siren call of media tie-ins, as Keyes then moved on to produce some of the better Babylon 5 and Star Wars tie-in novels, but in 2003 he bounced back with his take on epic fantasy, The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, a four-volume series of which The Briar King is the first novel.

The Kingdom of Crotheny is facing rising tensions with the great kingdom of Hansa to the north. In the King's Forest there are rumours of monsters and banditry. The royal court is infested with treason and intrigue. Even the church is tainted by the growing corruption. Rumours abound of the imminent return of an ancient god, the Briar King, whose resurrection will portend the end of the world. Several characters are caught up in the growing chaos, and we follow their stories as the world enters a great period of uncertainty and conflict.

It sounds like epic fantasy by numbers, but Keyes writes his story with refreshing enthusiasm and vigour. His characters are well-drawn and understandable, the storyline is told well and there's a strong infusion of both Celtic and Mediterrenean influences into the more traditional northern/western European medieval fantasy ideas on display here. The result is a book that in summary sounds like every other epic fantasy you've ever read, but in the reading turns out to be enjoyable, and a real page-turner to boot and some real shocks and surprises along the way. Keyes isn't afraid to kill off major characters or upset the status quo in a major way.

The Briar King (****½) is one of the best opening volumes to a fantasy sequence I've read in some time, and will be reading the sequels in short order. The book is published by Tor in the UK and USA, and is followed by The Charnel Prince, The Blood Knight and The Born Queen, all available now.

GRIPPING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BE WARNED-THIS IS NOT FOR BED READING! Don't get me wrong, not because its scary. i know if you are anything like me you will have heard (and doubted) this phrase many, many times-but it's true!!! this book really is unputdownable!

p.s. sorry about !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! all the time