Gemmell's standalone fantasy novels

Four fantasy novels published outside any series. They can be read in any order, and none needs another book to make sense.

Knights of Dark Renown sets a band of outlaws and misfits the task of reviving a vanished order of knights, while the king's Red Knights purge anyone with foreign blood. The Telegraph has reported that Gemmell wrote it after meeting a racist fan who assumed the author shared his views. Morningstar is told in the first person, unusually for Gemmell, by the bard Owen Odell, who watches a thief and outlaw, Jarek Mace, turned into a hero by the stories told about him. The Drenai timeline published on the Gemmell Awards website places both books in the far past of the Drenai world, and the Gemmell fan wiki agrees, but they were published as standalones and nothing in them depends on the Drenai books.

Dark Moon brings back the Daroth, an inhuman race that vanished a thousand years earlier, into lands exhausted by a long war over a mysterious pearl. The swordsman Tarantio, who shares his mind with a darker self called Dace, the strategist Karis and the healer Duvodas stand against them. Echoes of the Great Song is set among the Avatars, an immortal ruling caste whose long lives depend on failing crystals, as flood, ice and a new enemy break their empire and the humans beneath them start to resist.

What links them is Gemmell's habit of building a story around a small group of damaged people who decide to stand, with ancient races and gateways between worlds supplying the threat. Morningstar is the most unusual of the four, for its narrator and its wry tone. Knights of Dark Renown is the most openly angry. All four are good choices for a reader who wants one Gemmell novel without signing up for a series.

The books

Publication order, but any order works. Knights of Dark Renown and Morningstar can also be read as optional prehistory to the Drenai books.

1. 1Knights of Dark Renown (1989)The Knights of the Gabala rode through a demon gate and never returned. The one who stayed behind must follow them while a tyrant king hunts his people.
2. 2Morningstar (1992)A selfish outlaw is hailed as a legendary saviour, and the bard who rode with him tells how much of the legend was true.
3. 3Dark Moon (1996)An ancient race of killers returns to a world at war with itself, and a mercenary swordsman who shares his body with a second self stands in its way.
4. 4Echoes of the Great Song (1997)The near-immortal Avatars are losing the crystal power that sustains them when two moons appear and a crueller empire arrives to finish them.