The Lions of Al-Rassan
- 787
- Pages
- about 14 h
- Reading time
Affiliate link: buying through it supports BookRank at no extra cost to you.
Our view
“The Lions of Al-Rassan” has no villain, only three peoples sharing a land modelled on Moorish Spain and the friendships that cross between them. Kay’s concern is what people achieve together and what war takes away, and readers who stay to the end call it heartbreaking. Some give up within the first three hundred pages, unmoved by the characters, and some object that a fantasy with nothing fantastical in it is history under changed names.
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
The Lions of Al-Rassan is a 1995 historical fantasy novel by Canadian writer Guy Gavriel Kay. It is set in a peninsula of the same world in which The Sarantine Mosaic and The Last Light of the Sun are set, and is based on Moorish Spain. The novel concentrates on the relationships between the three peoples: the Kindath, the Asharites, and the Jaddites, although the religions of the Kindath, Asharites, and Jaddites, as described in the novel, bear no relation to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.4 across 174 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 54% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Fantasy average of 8.0. That is how 8.2 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardcover | 8.4 | 174 | 100% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Lions of Al-Rassan?
It has 787 pages — longer than 81% 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 8.2, the closest to this book.
