Tournament of Losers
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
All Rath wants is a quiet, peaceful life. Unfortunately, his father brings him too much trouble—and too many debts to pay—for that to ever be possible. When the local crime lord drags Rath out of bed and tells him he has three days to pay his father's latest debt, Rath doesn't know what to do. There's no way to come up with so much money in so little time.
Then a friend poses an idea just ridiculous enough to work: enter the Tournament of Losers, where every seventy-five years, peasants compete for the chance to marry into the noble and royal houses. All competitors are given a stipend to live on for the duration of the tournament—funds enough to cover his father's debt.
All he has to do is win the first few rounds, collect his stipend, and then it's back to trying to live a quiet life...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Derr (The High King's Golden Tongue) bolsters this romantic fantasy with a charismatic protagonist and an engagingly designed cod-medieval world, helping the story's clich d elements feel charmingly familiar rather than stale. Rath scrapes up funds through working at the docks or in brothels, paying his bills with just enough left over for the occasional ale at the pub with his friends. When a crime boss demands Rath pay the hefty debt Rath's father recently incurred, Rath realizes his only hope is to enter the Tournament of Charlet, often called the Tournament of Losers, in which commoners compete to marry the scions of noble houses. (The marriages need not be heterosexual; one appealing feature of Derr's setting is the casually depicted wide variety of genders and sexual preferences, and fighters of all kinds are admitted to the tournament.) Meanwhile, Rath begins developing a relationship with a nobleman he met at the pub, though he knows there's no future in such a match. Rath's kind heart and earthy pragmatism make him easy to root for, and while events unfold in thoroughly predictable ways, entertaining flourishes in both the tournament and the romance will sweep the reader along.
