The Elder Gods - Softcover

Eddings, David; Eddings, Leigh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007157606 ISBN 13: 9780007157600

Publisher: HarperVoyager, 2005

Synopsis

New series, new world, and a glorious story destined to reach the biggest audience yet.

They are called the Dreamers. They look like sleeping children. They are, in fact, Gods.

There are eight elder Gods, four awake, four asleep, by turns. When they sleep, they sleep for eons. The only time the Gods are vulnerable is when the sleepers awake.

Knowing this, the Ruler of the Wasteland, ambitious to become a God by destroying Gods, watches and waits, marshalling troops for war. So it is that the coming of the Dreamers passes unnoticed in the Wasteland. But the world is soon out of kilter, it is being dreamed, and the awakening of gods is no simple transition.

The sleeping Gods are stirring. When they wake the battle will begin.

There will be trickery and deception. Tribes of humans, creatures of the deep, the sea itself and the earth, the weather and the divinities, all will play their part in the epic struggle against the Ruler of the Wasteland.

In their own exquisitely effortless style, David and Leigh Eddings weave a web around the reader of magic, mystery and humour.

The Elder Gods is the first in a new and eagerly anticipated series of four books from the bestselling authors David and Leigh Eddings. It is a magical, action-packed, totally engaging and characterful novel on the grandest scale.

About this title

Review:

David and Leigh Eddings are reliable producers of bestselling commercial fantasy. The Elder Gods opens their new series "The Dreamers", likely to comprise four volumes at least.

In the island fantasyland of Dhrall, eight gods operate in two shifts of four: 25,000 years on, 25,000 years of peaceful sleep. The fly in the ointment is an insectile Dark Lord called the Vlagh, who lurks in the central wasteland and has bred a horde of hybrid nasties with lethal fangs and stingers. These will strike during the confusion of changeover, with the new rota of gods not yet fully awake and restored to power. The human race, generally favoured by the gods, will be wiped out to make room for hive-mind swarms...

But one God has a cunning plan. The four sleepers are wakened early, manifesting as the Dreamers: terminally cute children without knowledge of their real selves and names. Visions of the dark future haunt their dreams, which are also able to reshape the present. In their innocence these children can do the one thing forbidden to the Gods. They can kill.

Despite spies, attempted betrayals, and old rivalries between the gold-crazed mercenaries, preparations for the first defence of a God's domain go very smoothly. There's much feel-good camaraderie and enjoyable invention of warlike arts such as 3-D mapmaking and the mass manufacture of bronze arrowheads. Meanwhile, benevolent forces greater than the gods are on their side and ready to do favours for them and the Dreamers: Mother Sea, Father Earth, even the Moon. What could possibly go wrong?

Unfortunately, although the Vlagh's minions are individually rather stupid, their mass hive-mind is infinitely more cunning than anyone had suspected. There are nasty shocks in store and the initial too-cosy atmosphere of The Elder Gods begins to dwindle, with real darkness and danger looming as later volumes chronicle the three further assaults predicted against the remaining three domains of Dhrall. David and Leigh Eddings are experts in giving their fans what they want. --David Langford

Review:

‘All the verve and pace we’ve come to expect.’
The Dark Side

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperVoyager
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0007157606
• ISBN 13: 9780007157600
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 512