ritish book reviewer Bridie Roman reviewed Tad Williams’ latest Osten Ard novel, The Witchwood Crown, in SFX magazine this week, praising both the plot and the characters of the new series. Roman writes that the novel, sixth in the Osten Ard saga, has “a compelling plot filled with characters you genuinely care for.”
The Witchwood Crown, which will be released on June 27th, is Williams’ triumphant return to the world of Osten Ard, after a 23-year absence; it will be the first volume of a three-book series called “The Last King of Osten Ard”. The novel takes place 33 years after the conclusion of Williams’ New York Times bestselling novel To Green Angel Tower. Williams says he avoided writing further novels in Osten Ard because after 3,000 pages, he felt there were no more stories to tell in that world:
I said for years that I wouldn’t write a sequel to anything or even re-visit a world unless I had a story first, a story that cried out to be written. And for years Osten Ard was in that category, although I had thought a bit about the [Chronicle in Stone] project. Then, when I sat down one time to list off for Deborah (my wife and business partner) all the reasons I had no more stories about Simon and Miriamele and Binabik and the rest, I realized that I had left most of the main characters still very much in the bloom of their youth, and that after decades of life and growing responsibility—which I had undergone myself since I wrote it—they must all look at the world very differently. That set me to thinking, and within one night the first rudiments of the story for “The Last King of Osten Ard” (the title for the whole series) had begun to take real shape. So every moment I was aging, and moving from one country to another, and becoming a parent, and so on, I was actually creating a plot for new Osten Ard books without realizing it.
Bridie Roman states in the review of The Witchwood Crown that Tad Williams “has a fantastic way of writing characters so that they are both utterly vexing and entirely enjoyable at the same time.” Roman specifically singles out the new half-Norn character, Nezeru, as one of the stand-out new characters, calling the half-blood warrior the embodiment of “the flawed character archetype of which Williams was very much a genre pioneer.” SFX gives The Witchwood Crown 4/5 stars.
The Witchwood Crown will be followed by Empire of Grass and The Navigator’s Children, along with a standalone novel, also set in Osten Ard but chronicling a period 500 years earlier, tentatively called The Shadow of Things to Come. This will bring the number of Osten Ard books to nine (previous books in the saga included The Dragonbone Chair, Stone of Farewell, To Green Angel Tower, The Burning Man novella, and The Heart of What Was Lost). When complete, the Osten Ard saga is likely to surpass 6,000 pages and 2,000,000 words.
