The Drenai saga: all eleven novels in order

The Drenai novels share a world rather than a storyline. The Drenai are a nation in the west of an invented continent, guarded on the north by the six-walled fortress of Dros Delnoch and facing, beyond the mountains, the tribes of the Nadir steppe. The books range over more than a thousand years of its history, from the assassin Waylander in the time of the Vagrian invasion to Skilgannon's return in a far future where the fortress is a ruin. Most have their own cast and can be read alone. What happens in one book becomes legend, a name on a statue or a half-remembered song in the next.

The thread is Druss, the axeman who holds Dros Delnoch in Legend and whose earlier life fills The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend, The Legend of Deathwalker and White Wolf. The other recurring figures are Waylander, whose three books run from Waylander to Hero in the Shadows, and Skilgannon, the swordsman of White Wolf and The Swords of Night and Day. The King Beyond the Gate and Quest for Lost Heroes belong to the half-Nadir Tenaka Khan and the world after him. Winter Warriors stands apart, with three old soldiers and a new cast.

Read them in publication order, starting with Legend. That is how the world was built, and the later prequels are written for readers who already know how Druss's story ends. The genuine dependencies are few: The King Beyond the Gate before Quest for Lost Heroes, the Waylander books in sequence, and White Wolf before The Swords of Night and Day. An internal chronology is on the reading-order page; it is a good way to reread the saga, not to meet it.

What the books share is Gemmell's core material: sieges and last stands, ageing fighters whose bodies are failing them, killers looking for a way back, small brotherhoods such as the warrior-priests of the Thirty, and a stubborn belief that ordinary people can hold a line. The prose is plain and quick, the violence frequent and costly. The early books have a first novelist's roughness that the later ones lose.

Reading order

Publication order. Direct sequels: The King Beyond the Gate then Quest for Lost Heroes; Waylander, In the Realm of the Wolf, Hero in the Shadows; White Wolf then The Swords of Night and Day. The internal chronology is on the reading-order page.

1. 1Legend (1984)In Gemmell's first novel, an ageing axeman and a reluctant soldier help hold a six-walled fortress against a Nadir army half a million strong.
2. 2The King Beyond the Gate (1985)A century after Legend, a half-Nadir exile comes home to kill a mad emperor, and finds himself leading a rebellion instead.
3. 3Waylander (1986)The assassin who killed the Drenai king is asked to save the kingdom, by fetching the lost Armour of Bronze from deep in Nadir country.
4. 4Quest for Lost Heroes (1990)A village lad persuades four half-forgotten war heroes to ride onto the Nadir steppes and rescue a girl sold into slavery.
5. 5Waylander II: In the Realm of the Wolf (1992)Ten years on, Waylander lives quietly in the mountains with his daughter Miriel, until the assassins' guild takes a contract on his life.
6. 6The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend (1993)Druss as a young woodsman, following the slavers who took his wife Rowena across the sea and into a war in Ventria.
7. 7The Legend of Deathwalker (1996)Druss rides into Nadir lands after jewels that might save a dying friend, and ends up defending a Nadir shrine against a Gothir army.
8. 8Winter Warriors (1997)Three old soldiers, sent home by their king, are all that stands between a pregnant queen and the demon riders hunting her unborn son.
9. 9Hero in the Shadows (2000)An ageing Waylander, living rich and anonymous in Kydor, takes up the crossbow again when the gateway sealing an ancient evil starts to fail.
10. 10White Wolf (2003)Skilgannon the Damned leaves his monastery with his swords and a quest to raise the dead, and finds Druss the Legend on the same road.
11. 11The Swords of Night and Day (2004)A thousand years after his death, Skilgannon is grown again from his bones and wakes in a Drenai world ruled by a sorceress called the Eternal.