“Memory, Sorrow and Thorn” audiobooks in the works

Tad Williams' novels have long been available as audiobooks in Germany. Now "The Last King of Osten Ard" will get an English-language audiobook.

Tad Williams’ novels have long been available as audiobooks in Germany. Now “The Dragonbone Chair”, “Stone of Farewell” and “To Green Angel Tower” will get English-language audiobooks.

In Part 4 of our interview with Science Fiction/Fantasy author Tad Williams, Williams revealed plans for audio books for his classic “Memory, Sorrow and Thorn” series. In the US and the UK, the “MS&T” books have never been transferred to audio, other than an edition for sight-impaired readers that was released on audio-cassette in the 1990s. Requests for English-language audiobooks of “Memory, Sorrow and Thorn” have been made for many years, to no avail. German-language audiobooks have been available for a long time.

Today, Deborah Beale, wife and business partner of Tad Williams, just tweeted news that casting for the audiobooks for “Memory, Sorrow and Thorn” has commenced. It is presumed that the English-language audiobooks will be released in time for the release of the sequel to “MS&T”, called “The Last King of Osten Ard”. The first volume of the new series, called The Witchwood Crown, is expected in April 2016.

Updates about Tad Williams’ The Witchwood Crown released

Deborah Beale, wife and business partner of Tad Williams, has revealed a few new details on Twitter about Williams’ progress writing The Witchwood Crown, the first novel in the sequel to Williams’ classic “Memory, Sorrow and Thorn” series, “The Last King of Osten Ard”. The Witchwood Crown will be followed by Empire of Grass and The Navigator’s Children.

Beale tweeted several of Williams’ comments about the manuscript:

I’ve about 70pp to go to finish first draft which will then grow again in revision…
The finished thing will come in at about 1000 to 1100 pp. about 330 words per page
I’ll know much better what I’ve got when I sit down to read it before rewrite
I’ll probably release chapter titles in the next few weeks #TheWitchwoodCrown

(The original tweets can be found here, here, here and here).

During the writing of The Witchwood Crown, Williams has kept fans up to date regularly on page counts and some plot elements, including character lists and settings. The last update, in mid-December, mentioned that almost 800 pages had been written at that point, so about 200 to 300 pages have been written over the holidays. Williams is making rapid progress on the writing of the novel, which is expected to be published in Spring 2016.