The Bonehunters

About The Bonehunters

The Adjunct Tavore and the reconstituted 14th Malazan Army — now calling themselves the Bonehunters — have broken the Whirlwind rebellion in Seven Cities, but the victory feels hollow and the army they command is damaged, exhausted, and not entirely certain what they are fighting for anymore. The Bonehunters is the sixth volume in Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series, and it is the book where the series' full scope comes into the sharpest focus yet. Multiple storylines that have been developing separately since the series began start converging here: Quick Ben and Kalam return; the Crippled God's influence expands across the world; the gods begin moving their pieces more openly; and Tavore's mission — still cryptic, still unexplained — begins to reveal its shape without fully declaring itself to the reader or to the army following her. Erikson's prose in this volume is at its most confident and dark: the siege of Y'Ghatan, a sequence in which the city burns down around the soldiers trapped inside it, is one of the series' great sustained action sequences, and it carries genuine weight because the people inside it have been built as characters across thousands of previous pages. The Bonehunters is also where Erikson's long-running interest in what soldiers owe each other, and what empires owe soldiers, arrives at something close to a thematic crisis. Tavore is presented here as a figure of intense moral seriousness — someone who has made a decision about what is right and is paying its costs without asking her army to understand, only to follow. Some readers find her frustrating for exactly this reason; others find her the most interesting figure in the series precisely because of it. The Bonehunters is the volume where the series' architecture becomes most visible to a careful reader.

Tropes & Themes