Join Amazon Prime and get unlimited Free One-Day Delivery. Already a member? Sign in.

 

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
   
More Buying Choices
19 used & new from £0.49
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
Feast of Souls (Magister Trilogy)
 
See larger image 
Share your own customer images
Publisher: learn how customers can search inside this book.

Feast of Souls (Magister Trilogy) (Paperback)

by Celia Friedman (Author)
3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
RRP: £12.99
Price: £9.99 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £3.00 (23%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In stock.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk. Gift-wrap available.

Only 1 left in stock--order soon (more on the way).

Want guaranteed delivery by Saturday, July 11? Choose Express delivery at checkout. See Details
8 new from £2.29 11 used from £0.49
Other Editions: RRP: Our Price: Other Offers:
Hardcover 15 used & new from £1.23
Paperback £7.99 £5.99 38 used & new from £0.01

Frequently Bought Together

Feast of Souls (Magister Trilogy) + Black Sun Rising (Coldfire Trilogy) + When True Night Falls (Coldfire Trilogy)
Price For All Three: £21.97

Show availability and shipping details

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Black Sun Rising (Coldfire Trilogy)

Black Sun Rising (Coldfire Trilogy)

by Celia Friedman
4.5 out of 5 stars (53)  £5.99
When True Night Falls (Coldfire Trilogy)

When True Night Falls (Coldfire Trilogy)

by Celia Friedman
5.0 out of 5 stars (1)  £5.99
Crown of Shadows (Coldfire Trilogy)

Crown of Shadows (Coldfire Trilogy)

by Celia Friedman
5.0 out of 5 stars (2)  £5.99
The Painted Man (Demon Trilogy 1)

The Painted Man (Demon Trilogy 1)

by Peter V. Brett
4.3 out of 5 stars (118)  £4.31
The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Book 1

The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Book 1

by Patrick Rothfuss
4.5 out of 5 stars (52)  £6.29
› Explore similar items

Product details

  • Paperback: 464 pages
  • Publisher: Orbit (5 April 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 184149531X
  • ISBN-13: 978-1841495316
  • Product Dimensions: 23 x 15.2 x 3.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 510,074 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    •  Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Product Description

Review
'Friedman... writes bright, clear prose that can shine like gemstones or cut like broken glass. If you haven't read her work you need to do something about that right now' Tad Williams Praise for Black Sun Rising:'Hauntingly memorable protagonists, high drama, and vivid world-building ... A magnum opus of the imagination' Library Journal 'Classic high fantasy' Locus

Product Description
In the High Kingdom of Danton Aurelius, magisters from across the known world are gathering for an unusual meeting. The High King's son is dying of an apparently incurable wasting disease, and he has charged them with providing an explanation and a cure. There is a mystery here, but not the one the High King thinks: the magisters know the cause of the prince's illness but they dare not reveal it for fear that it will expose the secret at the heart of their order. No, the mystery is not what is responsible, but who...Now the magisters must embark upon a manhunt, racing against time, before the High King learns the truth. But they have not counted on the young prince's determination to control his own fate, nor on the existence of Kamala, a young woman schooled in their own arts, who will soon shake the world to its very roots.

See all Product Description

Suggested Tags from Similar Products

 (What's this?)
Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
Check a corresponding box or enter your own tags in the field below
(6)
(5)
(4)
(3)
(3)
(2)
(2)
(2)
(1)
(1)

Your tags: Add your first tag
 
See most popular tags

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Feast of Souls (Magister Trilogy)
63% buy the item featured on this page:
Feast of Souls (Magister Trilogy) 3.5 out of 5 stars (6)
£9.99
Black Sun Rising (Coldfire Trilogy)
12% buy
Black Sun Rising (Coldfire Trilogy) 4.5 out of 5 stars (53)
£5.99
Crown of Shadows (Coldfire Trilogy)
10% buy
Crown of Shadows (Coldfire Trilogy) 5.0 out of 5 stars (2)
£5.99
When True Night Falls (Coldfire Trilogy)
10% buy
When True Night Falls (Coldfire Trilogy) 5.0 out of 5 stars (1)
£5.99
Explore similar items
 

Customer Reviews

6 Reviews
5 star:    (0)
4 star:
 (5)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.5 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Good beginning to what should be another great series!, 12 Aug 2007
By Patrick St-Denis (Laval, Quebec Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Inexplicably, this latest offering by acclaimed author C. S. Friedman has been flying under the radar since last January. And given its quality, this sad state of affairs continues to baffle me. Feast of Souls marks Friedman's return to the fantasy genre. That, in and of itself, should be reason enough to buy this book! Like many other readers, I have been waiting for this moment since Crown of Shadows was published.

And yet, having read both Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind and Williams' Shadowplay earlier this year, I decided to wait a while before giving this one a chance. I try to balance everything by reading titles from various publishers -- an attempt to spread the joy, if you will. However, electing to wait before reading Feast of Souls proved to be a dumb move on my part, for the first volume of the Magister trilogy is without a doubt the very best of Daw Books' "big guns" of 2007.

More epic than dark fantasy this time around, Feast of Souls is a compelling opening chapter in a tale which appears vaster in scope than anything C. S. Friedman has written up until this point. Having said that, I feel that it's also the least self-contained novel the author has ever written. Whereas each volume of the Coldfire trilogy was more or less stand-alone -- even though part of an overall story arc -- Feast of Souls is definitely an introduction to a much more ambitious and complex fantasy epic.

Richly detailed worldbuilding intrigues the reader from the beginning. It's obvious that this book is meant to lay the groundwork for what will unfold in the upcoming sequels. As such, it makes for a slower pace for the better part of the first half of the novel. After that, the pace quickens and the storytelling makes it difficult to put this one down.

Characterization is a facet in which Friedman excels. It's a little harder to judge how memorable some of these characters will be, for Feast of Souls is comprised of multiple viewpoints. Hence, since the story reveals itself through the eyes of various POV characters, the narrative is not as powerful as that of the Coldfire trilogy. I'm not saying that the characterization leaves something to be desired, far from it. The author introduces us to an interesting and disparate cast of characters that give substance to this novel. The problem is that she leaves you wanting to learn more, again and again. This is especially true with Kamala, as well as the Magisters Colivar and Ramirus. More will be disclosed in the forthcoming volumes, of course. Sue me for wanting to know more right now!

One word of advice, though: C. S. Friedman now belongs to the school of thought which feels that having characters survive countless ordeals and star in multiple books/series is a somewhat obsolete concept. À la Martin, Lynch and Erikson, she has no qualms about getting rid of main characters when you least expect it. Consider yourself warned. . .;-)

The absence of a map did irk me to some extent. What can I say!?! Maybe I'm too "old school," but I'm one of those people who like to know where the action is taking place.

Imaginative and entertaining, with an ending that I never saw coming, Feast of Souls is probably the most underrated fantasy book of 2007. Give C. S. Friedman's latest a shot, lest it remains this year's best-kept secret!

Check out my blog: www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A Darkly Sumputous Feast (insert your own pun), 6 Sep 2008
This review is from: Feast of Souls (Magister Trilogy) (Paperback)
Sometimes known as C.S. Friedman, Celia is the author of the acclaimed dark science-fantasy Coldfire series, of which Black Sun Rising is probably her most well known work. It's a series I'd always heard good things about, and the US edition sported fantastic artwork from the effulgent Michael Whelan, so I was eager to get my hands on the UK edition... And then, it was pointed out, by one of the lovely people at Orbit Books, that Celia had a new book out, the augurous Feast of Souls...

Yum...

Magic plays a very large part in Feast of Souls, perhaps even defining it. The story is a set in a world that is realistic (and thus rather dark), vividly realised, where everything good, and bad, and in-between, has a price. Magic is an awesome thing, but above all, a deadly, dangerous thing. There are two types of magic user: witches -- mostly women -- draw upon the athra, their own soul-fire, to use their power, thus shortening their own lives. But Magisters -- until now, all men -- have a seemingly endless supply of power, are capable of great feats at little risk to themselves, and are immortal.

All men, until Kamala. Believing the exercise to be largely pointless, probably fatal to his student, but still worth giving a go -- after all, if you're immortal, you have to have some way to spend your time -- a Magister trains her. She must work as a witch, drawing all the fire out of her soul at an unnatural pace, and then, when the last spark goes out, latch onto a new source of power ... and once she's done that, she will be told a truth Magisters have kept silent from all non-Magisters: the new power doesn't draw upon her own life-force -- she doesn't really have any -- it draws upon someone else's, slowly draining them dry. Magisters have no way of knowing what "consort" they have picked, and feeling the slightest moment of regret will free the soul and leave her a drained husk: a corpse.

Why no women Magisters, then? It's believed that women, having been designed to bring life into the world, are too gentle to survive Magister training. This is said in a sneering tone. The world of Feast of Souls is technologically advanced about as far as the 15/16th Century, and many of the ideas of women as chattel and inferiors -- mentally, magically, and emotionally -- pervade society. In fact, in certain parts of the book, I'm tempted to say that Friedman perhaps over-dwelt on that aspect, as men in the book, with some notable exceptions, are taken, nigh axiomatically, as savage, controlling, sly boors, power thirsty and oppressive. I say tempted, because except for the occasional time when it came over too strong, I enjoyed the originality -- or rather, the originality in depicting the real truth -- of Celia's medieval-ish society.

The athra Kamala is stealing belongs, alas, to someone rather high-profile: the son of the High King. His "wasting sickness" has been noticed, and from all across the lands, Magisters are meeting in an effort to stop anyone prying too deeply into the illness, and finding their secrets. Meanwhile, the very world itself is in danger ... Magisters aren't the only creatures that feed on men's souls...

After a somewhat slow start, Friedman's wonderful prose and well-crafted characterisations won me over completely. Fast paced and eminently readable -- yet hellishly dark -- Feast of Souls is one of the better reads of this year. An apparently standard medieval setting soon reveals it's darker side; brutal often, captivating always, those 582 pages were an easy read and I can't wait for the sequel.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Darkly fantastic, 6 Sep 2008
Sometimes known as C.S. Friedman, Celia is the author of the acclaimed dark science-fantasy Coldfire series, of which Black Sun Rising is probably her most well known work. It's a series I'd always heard good things about, and the US edition sported fantastic artwork from the effulgent Michael Whelan, so I was eager to get my hands on the UK edition... And then, it was pointed out, by one of the lovely people at Orbit Books, that Celia had a new book out, the augurous Feast of Souls...

Yum...

Magic plays a very large part in Feast of Souls, perhaps even defining it. The story is a set in a world that is realistic (and thus rather dark), vividly realised, where everything good, and bad, and in-between, has a price. Magic is an awesome thing, but above all, a deadly, dangerous thing. There are two types of magic user: witches -- mostly women -- draw upon the athra, their own soul-fire, to use their power, thus shortening their own lives. But Magisters -- until now, all men -- have a seemingly endless supply of power, are capable of great feats at little risk to themselves, and are immortal.

All men, until Kamala. Believing the exercise to be largely pointless, probably fatal to his student, but still worth giving a go -- after all, if you're immortal, you have to have some way to spend your time -- a Magister trains her. She must work as a witch, drawing all the fire out of her soul at an unnatural pace, and then, when the last spark goes out, latch onto a new source of power ... and once she's done that, she will be told a truth Magisters have kept silent from all non-Magisters: the new power doesn't draw upon her own life-force -- she doesn't really have any -- it draws upon someone else's, slowly draining them dry. Magisters have no way of knowing what "consort" they have picked, and feeling the slightest moment of regret will free the soul and leave her a drained husk: a corpse.

Why no women Magisters, then? It's believed that women, having been designed to bring life into the world, are too gentle to survive Magister training. This is said in a sneering tone. The world of Feast of Souls is technologically advanced about as far as the 15/16th Century, and many of the ideas of women as chattel and inferiors -- mentally, magically, and emotionally -- pervade society. In fact, in certain parts of the book, I'm tempted to say that Friedman perhaps over-dwelt on that aspect, as men in the book, with some notable exceptions, are taken, nigh axiomatically, as savage, controlling, sly boors, power thirsty and oppressive. I say tempted, because except for the occasional time when it came over too strong, I enjoyed the originality -- or rather, the originality in depicting the real truth -- of Celia's medieval-ish society.

The athra Kamala is stealing belongs, alas, to someone rather high-profile: the son of the High King. His "wasting sickness" has been noticed, and from all across the lands, Magisters are meeting in an effort to stop anyone prying too deeply into the illness, and finding their secrets. Meanwhile, the very world itself is in danger ... Magisters aren't the only creatures that feed on men's souls...

After a somewhat slow start, Friedman's wonderful prose and well-crafted characterisations won me over completely. Fast paced and eminently readable -- yet hellishly dark -- Feast of Souls is one of the better reads of this year. An apparently standard medieval setting soon reveals it's darker side; brutal often, captivating always, those 582 pages were an easy read and I can't wait for the sequel.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars Just too long and Sooo boring...

I did my best - I really did, but just could not finish this book... I gave up at around a hundred or so pages left - which isn't such a lot I suppose when one considers... Read more
Published 5 months ago by FAMOUS NAME

4.0 out of 5 stars Eagerly awaiting book 2
This book was a really good return for me to the SF genre after a year and I was not disappointed. At first, the book began with different points of view and at one point... Read more
Published 15 months ago by Aingeal Fiction

4.0 out of 5 stars Good beginning for a new series
To be honest a book that I missed originally and one that I've come to lament in certain respects as it has some wonderful moments within the pages. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Gareth Wilson

Only search this product's reviews


Customer Discussions

 Beta (What's this?)
This product's forum (0 discussions)
  Discussion Replies Latest Post
  No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
  [Cancel]


Active discussions in related forums
   
Related forums

Listmania!

Create a Listmania! list

Look for similar items by category

Feedback

The Body Shop

The Body Shop - Vitamin C Skin Boost
Protect and boost your glow with The Body Shop Vitamin C Skin Boost.

›Shop The Body Shop

  

More From C. S. Friedman

Crown of Shadows

Crown of Shadows (Coldfire Trilogy)

Despite opposition by his Patriarch, warrior priest Damien Vryce again... Read more
£7.99 £5.99

 

We've Got Converse

Converse
Stock up on your favourite styles with great deals on Converse shoes.

›Shop Converse

  

Treat Someone

Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificates--available in any amount from £5 to £500 With an Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificate, you can get them what they want (even if you don't know what that is).

›Learn more about Gift Certificates

  
Ad

Where's My Stuff?

Delivery and Returns

Need Help?

Your Recent History

  (What's this?)
You have no recently viewed items or searches.

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.

Look to the right column to find helpful suggestions for your shopping session.
Continue Shopping: Top Sellers
The Girl Who Played with Fire
The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
4.5 out of 5 stars (72)£3.86
 Breaking Dawn (Twilight Saga)
Breaking Dawn (Twilight Saga) by Stephenie Meyer
4.1 out of 5 stars (458)£6.49
 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
4.1 out of 5 stars (161)£3.99
 The Host
The Host by Stephenie Meyer
4.2 out of 5 stars (80)£3.86

amazon.co.uk Amazon Home
International Sites:  United States  |  Germany  |  France  |  Japan  |  Canada  |  China
Business Programs: Sell on Amazon  |  Fulfilment by Amazon  |  Join Associates  |  Join Advantage
Customer Service  |  Help  |  View Basket  |  Your Account
About Amazon.co.uk  |  Careers at Amazon
Conditions of Use & Sale |  Privacy Notice  © 1996-2009, Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates