Blood of Elves
Winner of the David Gemmell Legend Award for Fantasy (2008).
Geralt, the witcher of Riva, is back – and this time he holds the fate of the whole land in his hands...
For more than a hundred years humans, dwarves, gnomes and elves lived together in relative peace. But times have changed, the uneasy peace is over and now the races once again fight each other – and themselves: dwarves are killing their kinsmen, and elves are murdering humans and elves, at least those elves who are friendly to humans...
Into this tumultuous time is born a child for whom the witchers of the world have been waiting. Ciri, the granddaughter of Queen Calanthe, the Lioness of Cintra, has strange powers and a stranger destiny, for prophecy names her the Flame, one with the power to change the world – for good, or for evil...
Geralt, the witcher of Rivia, has taken Ciri to the relative safety of the Witchers' Settlement, but it soon becomes clear that Ciri isn't like the other witchers. As the political situation grows ever dimmer and the threat of war hangs almost palpably over the land, Geralt searches for someone to train Ciri's unique powers. But someone else has an eye on the young girl, someone who understand exactly what the prophecy means – and exactly what Ciri's power can do.
This time Geralt may have met his match.
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Andrzej Sapkowski
Few writers have reshaped the fantasy landscape like Andrzej Sapkowski—though he never set out to become a legend. Long before The Witcher earned its place in gaming lore and Netflix queues, Sapkowski was a Polish economist with a love for stories that didn't flinch. In the late 1980s, he entered a short story competition with a sharp-edged tale about a monster hunter named Geralt. He didn’t just win; he kicked open the doors to an entirely new world—one filled with political tension, moral ambiguity, and beasts that often looked a lot like men.
The Witcher
In a land soaked with blood, riddled with ancient grudges and riddles sharper than swords, one man walks the line between myth and nightmare. Geralt of Rivia isn’t your typical hero—he’s a witcher, a monster hunter trained from childhood and mutated by alchemy to fight the creatures that haunt the dark. But in a world where humans are often crueler than beasts, what counts as a monster is rarely clear.
The Witcher consists of nine books — considered a complete series. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
Reviews and Comments
While I've never played The Witcher video game series, I have watched bits and pieces of it from time to time, and since I liked the world and characters, I thought it could be interesting to read Blood of Elves. Overall, I found this translation to be mediocre. I couldn't say, of course, anything about the original, but the story in itself wasn't particularly enthralling. Nothing actually really happens except a couple people change locations. There is very little description at all, and a lot of free dialogue without any detail into what's happening. There is a lot of character interaction and the dialogue itself is perfectly fine, but when it comes to action, practically nothing happens to further the story. A little fight here, a little betrayal there, but it's fuzzy and you're left thinking you know what happened but you're not entirely sure. There was one chapter, which seemed to be almost entirely pointless. There were no characters introduced that would reappear at any time, no actions or decisions that had later repercussions, and no lessons to be learned that were passed on to any plot further on in the story. It seems like it could definitely be a prelude to something much more interesting, and Geralt, Yennefer, Triss, and Ciri were all incredibly interesting characters. Perhaps that pointless chapter will contain something that will be relevant in another book, but as it stands, it wasn't especially good on any level. That being said, if you enjoyed the games, by all means give the book(s) a read and get a little more insight on the lives and relationships between the characters. I was happy to understand a bit more about the awkward relationship between Geralt, Yennefer, and Triss, myself.