The Family Trade
- 320
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“The Family Trade” opens “The Merchant Princes” with a clever premise: a tech journalist learns she belongs to a family from a parallel world. Charles Stross has Miriam Beckstein use her reporter’s instincts to dig into her mother’s past. Some readers find the economics heavy going; others feel the execution falls short of the idea. Its mix of money, kinship and conspiracy gives the fantasy an unusual edge.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
A bold fantasy in the tradition of Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, The Merchant Princes is a sweeping new series from the hottest new writer in science fiction! Miriam Beckstein is happy in her life. She's a successful reporter for a hi-tech magazine in Boston, making good money doing what she loves. When her researcher brings her iron-clad evidence of a money-laundering scheme, Miriam thinks she's found the story of the year. But when she takes it to her editor, she's fired on the spot and gets a death threat from the criminals she has uncovered. Before the day is over, she's received a locket left by the mother she never knew-the mother who was murdered when she was an infant. Within is a knotwork pattern, which has a hypnotic effect on her. Before she knows it, she's transported herself to a parallel Earth, a world where knights on horseback chase their prey with automatic weapons, and where world-skipping assassins lurk just on the other side of reality - a world where her true family runs things. The six families of the Clan rule the kingdom of Gruinmarkt from behind the scenes, a mixture of nobility and criminal conspirators whose power to walk between the worlds makes them rich in both. Braids of family loyalty and intermarriage provide a fragile guarantee of peace, but a recently-ended civil war has left the families shaken and suspicious. Taken in by her mother's people, she becomes the star of the story of the century-as Cinderella without a fairy godmother.
Reading order · The Merchant Princes
Full order & progress →- The Family TradeThis book
7.67.6 / 10 - The Hidden Family
7.87.8 / 10 - The Clan Corporate
7.67.6 / 10 - The Merchants' War
–Not ranked yet - The Revolution Business
–Not ranked yet - The Trade of Queens
–Not ranked yet - Empire Games
8.08.0 / 10 - Dark State
–Not ranked yet - Invisible Sun
–Not ranked yet
Where the score comes from
The sources average 6.9 across 88 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 37% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Fantasy average of 8.0. That is how 7.6 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 6.0 | 8 | 9% |
| Hardcover | 7.0 | 80 | 91% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Family Trade?
It has 320 pages — shorter than 92% of the ranked books in Fantasy.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Fantasy — and a score of 7.6, the closest to this book.
