Patricia A McKillip

In the new fantasy from the award-winning author of the Riddle-Master Trilogy, a young man comes of age amid family secrets and revelations, and transformative magic. Hidden away from the world by his mother, the powerful sorceress Heloise Oliver, Pierce has grown up working in her restaurant in Desolation Point. Traveling strangers tell him of the legendary capital city of Severluna. Heloise tells her son the truth: about his father, a knight in...

During the wedding festivities of the king, Cyan Dag, a knight of Gloinmere, is sought out by a mysterious bard and told a terrifying tale: that the king has married a false queen.

"Romantic, magical, respectful of fantasy's traditions without being awed by them, McKillip's novels are near perfect examples of fantasy in the fairy-tale or folkloric mold, and the latest, "Alphabet of Thorn," is among her best."--"Locus."

Scholar Phelan Cle is researching Bone Plain--which has been studied for the last 500 years, though no one has been able to locate it as a real place. Archaeologist Jonah Cle, Phelan's father, is also hunting through time, piecing history together from forgotten trinkets. His most eager disciple is Princess Beatrice, the king's youngest daughter. When they unearth a disk marked with ancient runes, Beatrice pursues the secrets of a lost language that...