When reading and writing are the most important things in the world.
Jevick, the pepper merchant's son, has been raised on stories of
Olondria, a distant land where books are as common as they are rare in
his home--but which his mother calls the Ghost Country. When his father
dies and Jevick takes his place on the yearly selling trip to Olondria,
Jevick's life is as close to perfect as he can imagine. Just as he
revels in Olondria's Rabelaisian Feast of Birds, he is pulled
drastically off course and becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate
young girl. In desperation, Jevick seeks the aid of Olondrian priests
and quickly becomes a pawn in the struggle between the empire's two most
powerful cults. Even as the country simmers on the cusp of war, he must
face his ghost and learn her story before he has any chance of freeing
himself by setting her free: an ordeal that challenges his understanding
of art and life, home and exile, and the limits of that most seductive
of necromancies, reading.
A Stranger in Olondria is a rich, immersive fantasy that circles
around and away from and back to the transportation of reading and how
ideas can be carried far from their origins in something so simple as a
book.
