Midnight Tides

About Midnight Tides

The Tiste Edur empire is expanding across the Letheras continent, driven by a treaty with a god that has given their king a cursed sword that kills him over and over and resurrects him with growing madness, and the Letherii — a civilization built on debt, commerce, and the legal fiction that everything has a price — are about to be consumed by something they can neither buy nor rationalize away. Midnight Tides is the fifth book in Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series, and it is the most structurally self-contained of the ten volumes: it operates entirely on a continent that has not appeared in previous books, with a cast of characters who have no direct connection to the main series storyline, and readers who have been following the Bridgeburners and the Adjunct Tavore will find nothing familiar. This is deliberate. Erikson is building a world, not just a story, and Midnight Tides is the introduction to half of the world the final volumes will require. The Sengar brothers — Trull, Fear, Binadas, and the youngest Rhulad — are one of the series' finest character studies: four men who love each other and are destroyed by their love of their people, their sense of honor, and the ambition of forces larger than any of them. Trull in particular is Erikson at his best, a character defined by his capacity to see clearly what others refuse to acknowledge and the cost of that clarity. The Letherii side of the narrative gives Erikson room to run one of fantasy's more sustained critiques of market capitalism: the Letherii empire is not a cartoonish villain but a recognizable extrapolation of how debt, status anxiety, and institutional rationalization actually work. Midnight Tides is a necessary investment for readers committed to the Malazan series.

Tropes & Themes