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Quillifer  By  cover art

Quillifer

By: Walter Jon Williams
Narrated by: Ralph Lister
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Publisher's summary

"In Quillifer, Williams has presented us with a picaresque novel in the grand tradition of Fielding's Tom Jones, big as life and three times as amazing and affecting." (Locus Magazine)

From New York Times best-selling and award-winning author Walter Jon Williams comes an adventurous epic fantasy about a man who is forced to leave his comfortable life and find his fortune among goddesses, pirates, war, and dragons.

Quillifer is young, serially in love, studying law, and living each day keenly aware that his beloved homeport of Ethlebight risks closure due to silting of the harbor. His concerns for the future become much more immediate when he returns from a summery assignation to find his city attacked by Aekoi pirates, leading to brigands in the streets and his family and friends in chains.

First he has to survive the night. Then he has to leave his home behind and venture forth into the wider world of Duisland, where he can find friends and allies to help avenge his losses and restore Ethlebight to glory. His determination will rock kingdoms, shatter the political structure of Duisland, and change the country forever.

©2017 Walter Jon Williams (P)2017 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"For all of you who need some great fantasy to read while you're waiting for THE WINDS OF WINTER...try QUILLIFER, by Walter Jon Williams. WJW is always fun, but this may be his best yet, a delight from start to finish, witty, colorful, exciting and amusing by turns, exquisitely written. I loved meeting [Quillifer] and look forward to seeing him again." (George R.R. Martin)

What listeners say about Quillifer

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    5 out of 5 stars

The opposite of George R R Martin (in a good way)

Walter Jon Williams is a legend in science fiction and fantasy, and writes pretty much the opposite of grimdark swords and sorcery, an excellent tonic when you have read too many depressing fantasy novels. That isn't to say that there aren't rogues and ambivalent characters (Quillifer himself is not exactly a standard hero), but his books are full of adventures, wit, and warmth - and Quillifer is his best book in ages, perhaps ever.

The story is set in a kingdom during quasi-Elizabethian times - there are knights and lords, but also cannon and playwrights and guilds and all of the other trappings of early modernity. There are many parallels to our own world as well, but not everything matches exactly, including the fact that the world of Quillifer had some magic in the past. The story itself is a coming-of-age story of the really likable rogue that is Quillifer - adventurer, scoundrel, and pawn of fate - as he makes his fortune in trade, wars, love,, and the court. I won't give away much, but it is always engaging, the detail level is terrific, and the language sings.

I strongly recommend this book if you like good old-fashioned swashbuckling fantasy with a slight twist. The reader becomes stronger throughout, and this is the first book of a planned series, so I am eagerly awaiting the next!

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19 people found this helpful

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much deeper than preview suggest

surprised by how much I liked it. the characters were much deeper then the book first sounded on the preview. I never really knew what was going to happen next which is another reason I enjoyed the book. definitely worth of the credit. I really wish there was a sequel or a trilogy.. I'm going back to see what else the author has written. I'm finishing this book at almost 1 a.m.

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5 people found this helpful

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Empty protagonist falls flat

I love stories about likable rogues. Overcoming odds while giving the bird to the powers at be is a sentiment I can readily get behind. Quillifer is a rogue at heart, but his heart is empty and vein. While the author attempts to drum up sympathy for the protagonist early in the story, Quillifer always ends up finding a way as a character to rub me the wrong way. Be it his arrogance, his hit em and quit em womanizing, or his greed, I found him to be rather loathsome by books end. I guess I, unlike the author, can’t enjoy fantasizing about being a total d*ck.

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Ralph Lister Puts the Shine on a Turd of a Story.

Woof! I'm just striking out left, right and center with my reads lately. QUILLIFER it's yet another book that I just couldn't get through. Maybe it's me. I just don't know anymore.

I got about three quarters of the way through this beast before finally throwing in the towel. After the fifteenth time that I put this book down I feel l finally decided not to pick it back up.

QUILLIFER tells the story of a fop who stumbled he's way from good fortune to good fortune while making a good deal of enemies along the way. It was well written and I actually enjoyed the fop quite a bit. The problem for me was the storyline itself. It was just all over the place. For having so many enemies, tragedies and drive Quillifer's story lacks urgency. He basically drifts from plot point to plot point and for me it got old after a while.

I usually give DNFs a straight one star rating but I'm giving this a extra for Quillifer's likability.

RECOMMENDATION: Probably Pass On It.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

A more realistic hero

His morals may be shaky but his hart in the right place...sometimes. Just be glad he's not dating your sister. A lovable rogue who has no issues with taking advantage a situation.

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“a gift for showing mortals as they really are”

Walter Jon Williams’ Quillifer (2017) is a picaresque fantasy novel set in a secondary world that parallels late-Renaissance Europe: gunpowder, firearms, and artillery are replacing heavy armor on the battlefield; the rivalrous countries are monarchies with aristocrats atop the social and political pyramid; the printing press has expanded education to commoners; poets and playwrights are in demand; guilds run the labor sphere; and age of sail sea power for trade and privateering is vital. An unmarried, untested princess even becomes Queen after the death of her father. The differences between Williams’ Duisland and Elizabethan England are the existence of fantastic creatures like dragons (though in the novel only a few small wyverns play a cameo) and the persistence of polytheism alongside the dominant religion worshipping “the Compassionate Pilgrim.” Oh, and an absence of exploration and colonization and of people of color as they are in our world (there is a humanoid race of gold-skinned and strange-eyed Aekoi, remnants of an “Empire” whose glory days are long past but whose literature and language are still studied in the white countries).

Our first-person guide to this world is Quillifer (his only name), an eighteen-year-old butcher’s son apprentice lawyer crackling with charisma, confidence, intelligence, humor, and folly. Williams uses a creaky and excrescent conceit for his narrative, having Quillifer tell his life story (which takes nearly nineteen hours as an audiobook!) in one sitting to a new lover who remains passively and fragrantly listening, nearly forgotten, and unidentified until the end of the novel. Because of his youthful energy, ambition, joie de vivre, and recklessness (“Content is not for the young and dauntless, those who wish to brand the world with their mark”), Quillifer is repeatedly doing something clever and foolish and getting into and out of a fix, all with increasingly higher stakes, including scenes in which he flees an interrupted tryst bare-arsed over city rooftops, serves a writ on a sharp practicing knight among his hounds and servants, gets captured by bandits, enters the world of a goddess, enhances the comedy of a play, arranges a sea battle, fights in a land battle, and much more. He ever evinces a gift for making enemies in high places and friends in lower ones. Throughout his (mis)adventures, he wonders how much of what happens to him is due to “necessity” (fate), to “divine malevolence,” or to his own ambition.

Quillifer says he’s no swordsman, assassin, spy, or equestrian, but then, what is he? He starts coming across as a protean Johnny-on-the-spot entrepreneur dealing in military contracts, stolen treasure, prize ships, and pillaged deeds. He should be an actor in his friend Blackwell’s troupe, for when trying to persuade people he assumes a number of faces, from learned-advocate and exasperated-bailiff to attentive-courtier and innocent-choirboy. He is surely a lover of young ladies unmarried or married and can’t understand why their men-folk should so oppose young people enjoying life (the novel is heteronormative--even his friend the Duke of Roundsilver, who is rumored to be a “degenerate” and affectedly says r like w is happily married and never comes on to Quillifer).

Williams writes all of the above things with panache, enthusiasm, and attention to historical detail--he must have researched the late Renaissance quite a bit, from the many different weapons and armor and ships to the poets and dramatists and language of the era. He loves language, so he has Quillifer (and a bandit and a goddess) indulge in coining new words like baseless, logomania, poetastical, credent, and unhoused. He writes colorful insults like “soulless mechanicals” and savory vintage dialogue like “Perhaps you should restrain your impulse to hurl yourself so whole-heartedly into situations fraught with ambiguity.” Indeed, the best moments in the book probably consist of Quillifer talking about philosophy, politics, love, war, chess, gunpowder, gods, plays, laws, and the like.

And Williams writes many vivid descriptions, whether of ships, war, food, clothes, people, buildings, or action. Numerous neat touches, like an old man whose “voice sounded like a blind mouse scrabbling in its nest of paper” or the hail shot fired from a cannon making “wild wailing cries in the air.” He’s everywhere exuberant, even in a throwaway detail like the following that illustrates the Elizabethan vibe, Williams’ realism, and Quillifer’s character: “On my return to the quay I tarried by a barber’s shop, and there sought a preventative for parturience. My last packet of sheaths I had left with Annabel Greyson, and I could but hope her father hadn’t found them, proof of her perfidy.”

Ralph Lister reads the audiobook professionally and enthusiastically, though I found his manner and voice for female characters grating, turning almost all of them into nasal shrews.

Through the course of his misadventures Quillifer matures, coming to a “healthy to laugh at ourselves” appreciation of “mortals as they really are, scheming and blundering in their vain useless way to catastrophe,” and so because I enjoyed Williams’ language and hijinks, I intend to read the next book in the series--and not only to find out what his hero will do next. But if you don’t want to read a very white, very heterosexual, very male, and very European historical fantasy with plenty of verbal play and physical action, you might want to pass.

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Walter Jon Williams is one of my favorite authors

Loved the story and loved the narration. Ralf Lister is brilliant. Vivid imagery, characters and a wonderful creation of a society in a rose war-ish construction and setting.

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  • 08-21-19

Recommend by George R R Martin.

I picked up Quilifer because of GRRM and damn I am happy I did! What an adventure!! can't wait for more!

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Very Enjoyable

This is a wonderful and witty story about Quillifer the failed lawyer, failed courtier, and failed thief snatcher, but ultimately great fellow. Funny and fun. Totally worth reading.

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slow start, but ramps up

by the end, I really enjoyed the book. He's a great author and I've loved his scifi books. this one is (obviously) a huge departure from scifi! I wasnt thrilled with the narrator... not for lack of talent, but felt his voice wasn't right for the story. Too school boy sounding, if that makes sense? possibly an unfair criticism of the narrator. Anyway, by chapter 7, I was ready to move on to something else. I'm glad I stuck with it. Became a great story that was so engrossing, I was disheartened when it ended! cant wait for October when the next chapter comes out.

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