Part of Series
In 1997, Terry Brooks reinvented the fantasy genre with Running with the Demon, a dark contemporary urban fantasy. Now he returns to that Word and Void mythos with a novella sure to delight his readers and a story as powerful as that previous trilogy. Sinnissippi Park, in Hopewell, Illinois, has long been a place of magic. Jack McCall learned this at a young age when confronted with a deadly childhood disease. He overcame that threat with aid from the unlikeliest of companions—the woodland creature Pick and his trusted owl Daniel—and the magic that existed within his own heart. Now grown, Jack has graduated from college, leaving behind that terrible time and having never witnessed magic again. That is about to change. Lacking direction in life, he is summoned by the Lady, who recruits men and women to the service of the Word. For she is in dire need of Jack's unique history to help preserve the world's future—a service that will be needed only once but on which all things hinge.
Author
Terry Brooks was born in Illinois in 1944, where he spent a great deal of his childhood and early adulthood dreaming up stories in and around Sinnissippi Park, the very same park that would eventually become the setting for his bestselling Word & Void trilogy. He went to college and received his undergraduate degree from Hamilton College, where he majored in English Literature, and he received his graduate degree from the School of Law at Washington & Lee University. A writer since high school, he wrote many stories within the genres of science fiction, western, fiction, and non-fiction, until one semester early in his college years he was given The Lord of the Rings to read. That moment changed Terry's life forever, because in Tolkien's great work he found all the elements needed to fully explore his writing combined in one genre. He then wrote The Sword of Shannara, the seven year grand result retaining sanity while studying at Washington & Lee University and practicing law. It became the first work of fiction ever to appear on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list, where it remained for over five months.
