Soldiers Live
Book Four of Glittering Stone
When sorcerers and demigods go to war, those wars are fought by mercenaries, "dog soldiers," grunts in the trenches. And the stories of those soldiers are the stories of Glen Cook's hugely popular "Black Company" novels. If the Joseph Heller of Catch-22 were to tell the story of The Lord of the Rings, it might read like the Black Company books. There is nothing else in fantasy like them.
Now, at last, Cook brings the "Glittering Stone" cycle within the Black Company series to an end... but an end with many other tales left to tell. As Soldiers Live opens, Croaker is military dictator of all the Taglias, and no Black Company member has died in battle for four years. Croaker figures it can't last. He's right.
For, of course, many of the Company's old adversaries are still around. Narayan Singh and his adopted daughter – actually the offspring of Croaker and the Lady – hope to bring about the apocalyptic Year of the Skulls. Other old enemies like Shadowcatcher, Longshadow, and Howler are also ready to do the Company harm. And much of the Company is still recovering from the fifteen years many of them spent in a stasis field.
Then a report arrives of an evil spirit, a forvalaka, that has taken over one of their old enemies. It attacks them at a shadowgate – setting off a chain of events that will bring the Company to the edge of apocalypse and, as usual, several steps beyond.
Glen Cook is the leading modern writer of epic fantasy noir, and Soldiers Live is Cook at his best. None of his legion of fans will want to miss it.
Glen Cook
Glen Cook is the author of dozens of novels of fantasy and science fiction, including The Black Company, The Garret Files, Instrumentalities of the Night, and the Dread Empire series. Cook was born in 1944 in New York City. He attended the Clarion Writers' Workshop in 1970, where he met his wife. He currently makes his home in St. Louis, MO.
A Chronicle of the Black Company
The series follows an elite mercenary unit, The Black Company, last of the Free Companies of Khatovar, through roughly forty years of its approximately four hundred year history. Cook mixes fantasy with military fiction in gritty, down-to-earth portrayals of the Company's chief personalities and its struggles.
A Chronicle of the Black Company consists of nine primary books, and includes two additional books that complement the series but are not considered mandatory reads. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
Related series The Black Company (omnibus editions)
Related series A Pitiless Rain