But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting or else it's merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. Or perhaps it's a seat in a garden, or even a square perhaps you've been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. A Stranger in Olondria Sofia Samatar Book One: The Wind of Miracles Chapter One: Childhood in Tyom As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there - the end of the books. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly? - No.

14, 2020 This slowly-unraveling, exquisitely-detailed novel made the poet Sofia Samatar a World Fantasy Award winner and a Nebula Award finalist.

You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar Oct.

Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end.

A stranger in olondria