Recommend by George R R Martin.

I picked up Quilifer because of GRRM and damn I am happy I did! What an adventure!! can't wait for more!

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Intriguing voice and tone

I enjoyed listening to the book. Rich language and colorful descriptions. The plot flowed and I felt like I'm in the hands of a skillful story-teller.

Although the story is set in a fantasy settings, I was transported to a Renascence-like environment similar to Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers.

I'll read more of Walter Jon Williams's work.

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good, slow start decent finish

The narration as spot on and good. I was worried at first about the beginning, it's slow to start and can drag at moment but overall the story does well to move, and resolve it's self.

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“a gift for showing mortals as they really are”

Walter Jon Williams’ Quillifer (2017) is a picaresque fantasy novel set in a secondary world that parallels late-Renaissance Europe: gunpowder, firearms, and artillery are replacing heavy armor on the battlefield; the rivalrous countries are monarchies with aristocrats atop the social and political pyramid; the printing press has expanded education to commoners; poets and playwrights are in demand; guilds run the labor sphere; and age of sail sea power for trade and privateering is vital. An unmarried, untested princess even becomes Queen after the death of her father. The differences between Williams’ Duisland and Elizabethan England are the existence of fantastic creatures like dragons (though in the novel only a few small wyverns play a cameo) and the persistence of polytheism alongside the dominant religion worshipping “the Compassionate Pilgrim.” Oh, and an absence of exploration and colonization and of people of color as they are in our world (there is a humanoid race of gold-skinned and strange-eyed Aekoi, remnants of an “Empire” whose glory days are long past but whose literature and language are still studied in the white countries).

Our first-person guide to this world is Quillifer (his only name), an eighteen-year-old butcher’s son apprentice lawyer crackling with charisma, confidence, intelligence, humor, and folly. Williams uses a creaky and excrescent conceit for his narrative, having Quillifer tell his life story (which takes nearly nineteen hours as an audiobook!) in one sitting to a new lover who remains passively and fragrantly listening, nearly forgotten, and unidentified until the end of the novel. Because of his youthful energy, ambition, joie de vivre, and recklessness (“Content is not for the young and dauntless, those who wish to brand the world with their mark”), Quillifer is repeatedly doing something clever and foolish and getting into and out of a fix, all with increasingly higher stakes, including scenes in which he flees an interrupted tryst bare-arsed over city rooftops, serves a writ on a sharp practicing knight among his hounds and servants, gets captured by bandits, enters the world of a goddess, enhances the comedy of a play, arranges a sea battle, fights in a land battle, and much more. He ever evinces a gift for making enemies in high places and friends in lower ones. Throughout his (mis)adventures, he wonders how much of what happens to him is due to “necessity” (fate), to “divine malevolence,” or to his own ambition.

Quillifer says he’s no swordsman, assassin, spy, or equestrian, but then, what is he? He starts coming across as a protean Johnny-on-the-spot entrepreneur dealing in military contracts, stolen treasure, prize ships, and pillaged deeds. He should be an actor in his friend Blackwell’s troupe, for when trying to persuade people he assumes a number of faces, from learned-advocate and exasperated-bailiff to attentive-courtier and innocent-choirboy. He is surely a lover of young ladies unmarried or married and can’t understand why their men-folk should so oppose young people enjoying life (the novel is heteronormative--even his friend the Duke of Roundsilver, who is rumored to be a “degenerate” and affectedly says r like w is happily married and never comes on to Quillifer).

Williams writes all of the above things with panache, enthusiasm, and attention to historical detail--he must have researched the late Renaissance quite a bit, from the many different weapons and armor and ships to the poets and dramatists and language of the era. He loves language, so he has Quillifer (and a bandit and a goddess) indulge in coining new words like baseless, logomania, poetastical, credent, and unhoused. He writes colorful insults like “soulless mechanicals” and savory vintage dialogue like “Perhaps you should restrain your impulse to hurl yourself so whole-heartedly into situations fraught with ambiguity.” Indeed, the best moments in the book probably consist of Quillifer talking about philosophy, politics, love, war, chess, gunpowder, gods, plays, laws, and the like.

And Williams writes many vivid descriptions, whether of ships, war, food, clothes, people, buildings, or action. Numerous neat touches, like an old man whose “voice sounded like a blind mouse scrabbling in its nest of paper” or the hail shot fired from a cannon making “wild wailing cries in the air.” He’s everywhere exuberant, even in a throwaway detail like the following that illustrates the Elizabethan vibe, Williams’ realism, and Quillifer’s character: “On my return to the quay I tarried by a barber’s shop, and there sought a preventative for parturience. My last packet of sheaths I had left with Annabel Greyson, and I could but hope her father hadn’t found them, proof of her perfidy.”

Ralph Lister reads the audiobook professionally and enthusiastically, though I found his manner and voice for female characters grating, turning almost all of them into nasal shrews.

Through the course of his misadventures Quillifer matures, coming to a “healthy to laugh at ourselves” appreciation of “mortals as they really are, scheming and blundering in their vain useless way to catastrophe,” and so because I enjoyed Williams’ language and hijinks, I intend to read the next book in the series--and not only to find out what his hero will do next. But if you don’t want to read a very white, very heterosexual, very male, and very European historical fantasy with plenty of verbal play and physical action, you might want to pass.

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Very Enjoyable

This is a wonderful and witty story about Quillifer the failed lawyer, failed courtier, and failed thief snatcher, but ultimately great fellow. Funny and fun. Totally worth reading.

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A more realistic hero

His morals may be shaky but his hart in the right place...sometimes. Just be glad he's not dating your sister. A lovable rogue who has no issues with taking advantage a situation.

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Empty protagonist falls flat

I love stories about likable rogues. Overcoming odds while giving the bird to the powers at be is a sentiment I can readily get behind. Quillifer is a rogue at heart, but his heart is empty and vein. While the author attempts to drum up sympathy for the protagonist early in the story, Quillifer always ends up finding a way as a character to rub me the wrong way. Be it his arrogance, his hit em and quit em womanizing, or his greed, I found him to be rather loathsome by books end. I guess I, unlike the author, can’t enjoy fantasizing about being a total d*ck.

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4 people found this helpful

The Screaming Infant Face

Been making it all day as I realized I have only one last book in the trilogy to go.
I liked the episodic feel to this; I realllllllly want this on HBO.

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Walter Jon Williams is one of my favorite authors

Loved the story and loved the narration. Ralf Lister is brilliant. Vivid imagery, characters and a wonderful creation of a society in a rose war-ish construction and setting.

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slow start, but ramps up

by the end, I really enjoyed the book. He's a great author and I've loved his scifi books. this one is (obviously) a huge departure from scifi! I wasnt thrilled with the narrator... not for lack of talent, but felt his voice wasn't right for the story. Too school boy sounding, if that makes sense? possibly an unfair criticism of the narrator. Anyway, by chapter 7, I was ready to move on to something else. I'm glad I stuck with it. Became a great story that was so engrossing, I was disheartened when it ended! cant wait for October when the next chapter comes out.

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