- Fantasy fiction
The Shadow of the Torturer is the first volume in the four-volume series, The Book of the New Sun. It is the tale of young Severian, an apprentice in the Guild of Torturers on the world called Urth, exiled for committing the ultimate sin of his profession -- showing mercy toward his victim -- and follows subsequent journey out of his home city of Nessus.
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Character
Grave, earnest, bleak and contemplative.
- gravecomic
- earnestironic
- warmbleak
- contemplativerelentless
- sparerichly built
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About the book
- Author
- Gene Wolfe
- First published
- 1980
- Pages
- 303
- Publisher
- Denoël, Meulenhoff SF, DENOEL
- Editions
- 22
- Language
- French, English, Spanish
- ISBN
- 9780671540661
Where to read
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On Open Library, 39 have read it and 116 want to.
Gene Wolfe was born in Texas. After dropping out from Texas A&M University, he served in the Korean War, and later graduated from the University of Houston. He worked first as an engineer, notably designing part of the machine that produces Pringles potatoe chips, and later as the editor of a professional engineering magazine, *Plant Engineering*. Wolfe was a prolific writer, publishing over 30 novels and hundreds of short stories in his life. He was known for the complexity of his narratives and the depth of his characters, frequently using unreliable or fallible narrators to enhance his thematic focus on memory. His work explores topics of morality, often through the lens of his Catholic f
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