Towers of Midnight [-99]

The penultimate book in the shelf-olic series of The Wheel of Time is called Towers of Midnight and it is scheduled to be published on November 2, which makes it 99 days from today. Here is the planned U.S. cover, so much in line with the previous covers that I am now getting used to their ugliness and poor connection with the books. (Search the Web for an even uglier earlier version, where characters are suffering from the vanishing mid-body disease!) Still removing the cover when reading in the metro, of course! (On the other hand, a much more interesting series of covers have just been designed for the e-book versions of the fourteen books.) As for The Gathering Storm, the thirteenth book in the series is written by Brandon Sanderson, following the threads weaved by Robert Jordan. While the dust jacket entry is too dramatic for my taste,

The Last Battle has started. The seals on the Dark One’s prison are crumbling. The Pattern itself is unraveling, and the armies of the Shadow have begun to boil out of the Blight.

Dovie’andi se tovya sagain. It’s time to toss the dice.

The sun has begun to set upon the Third Age.

Perrin Aybara is now hunted by specters from his past: Whitecloaks, a slayer of wolves, and the responsibilities of leadership. All the while, an unseen foe is slowly pulling a noose tight around his neck. To prevail, he must seek answers in Tel’aran’rhiod and find a way–at long last–to master the wolf within him or lose himself to it forever.

Meanwhile, Matrim Cauthon prepares for the most difficult challenge of his life. The creatures beyond the stone gateways–the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn–have confused him, taunted him, and left him hanged, his memory stuffed with bits and pieces of other men’s lives. He had hoped that his last confrontation with them would be the end of it, but the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills. The time is coming when he will again have to dance with the Snakes and the Foxes, playing a game that cannot be won. The Tower of Ghenjei awaits, and its secrets will reveal the fate of a friend long lost.

This penultimate novel of Robert Jordan’s #1 New York Times bestselling series–the second of three based on materials he left behind when he died in 2007–brings dramatic and compelling developments to many threads in the Pattern. The end draws near.

I hope I will enjoy this one-before-last book as much as The Gathering Storm. Although Sanderson’s style is not particularly lively, he is nicely bringing the series to its conclusion without creating new threads that will justify a fifteenth or sixteenth volume!