Words of Radiance

The second Stormlight volume is where some readers only half won over by the first become committed: the magic grows more dangerous, the feuds sharpen, and the battles carry real stakes. Its idealistic heroes, slowly learning their powers, earn their triumphs alongside genuine despair. The earnestness strikes some as sentimental at times, and at nearly eleven hundred pages this is no place to start. For those already in the series, it is the reward.

Worth knowing Published in March 2014, it continues directly from The Way of Kings. Each book of the Stormlight Archive centres its flashbacks on one character; here it is Shallan, whose past explains much of what she does in the present. At well over a thousand pages, it is split into two volumes in some translations. Short interludes between the parts follow people elsewhere on Roshar and widen the world for later books.

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