The City of Brass
A Novel
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4.5 • 2件の評価
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- ¥1,600
発行者による作品情報
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Library Journal | Vulture | The Verge | SYFYWire
Step into The City of Brass, the spellbinding epic fantasy debut from S. A. Chakraborty, an imaginative alchemy of The Golem and the Jinni, The Grace of Kings, and Uprooted, in which the future of a magical Middle Eastern kingdom rests in the hands of a clever and defiant young con artist with miraculous healing gifts.
Nahri has never believed in supernatural magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of eighteenth-century Cairo, this female protagonist is a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trades she uses to get by—palm readings, zars, and a mysterious gift for healing—are all tricks, both the means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles and a reliable way to survive.
But when Nahri accidentally summons Dara, an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior, to her side during one of her cons, this portal fantasy adventure catapults her into a world she’s forced to reconsider her beliefs. For Dara tells Nahri an extraordinary tale: across hot, windswept sands teeming with creatures of fire and rivers where the mythical marid sleep, past ruins of once-magnificent human metropolises and mountains where the circling birds of prey are more than what they seem, lies Daevabad, the legendary city of brass—a hidden city to which Nahri is irrevocably bound.
In Daevabad, within gilded brass walls laced with enchantments and behind the six gates of the six djinn tribes, old resentments and political intrigue run deep. And when Nahri decides to enter this world, her arrival threatens to ignite a war that has been simmering for centuries.
Spurning Dara’s warning of the treachery surrounding her, she embarks on a hesitant friendship with Alizayd, an idealistic prince who dreams of rebellion. All too soon, Nahri learns that true power is fierce and brutal. That magic cannot shield her from the dangerous web of court politics in this high fantasy world. That even the cleverest of schemes can have deadly consequences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The familiar fantasy theme of a young person learning of a hidden supernatural legacy is given new life in this promising debut novel, set in late-18th-century Egypt. Twenty-something Nahri, who has the ability to sense illness in others and to heal some ailments, supports herself as a fortune-teller and con artist in Cairo. Her routine, if precarious, existence, is shattered when a girl she is trying to help is possessed by an ifrit. Nahri only avoids being killed through the intervention of Dara, a djinn, who reveals that Nahri is from a family of magical healers. Chakraborty combines the plot's many surprises with vivid prose ("The cemetery ran along the city's eastern edge, a spine of crumbling bones and rotting tissue where everyone from Cairo's founders to its addicts were buried"), and leavens the action with wry humor. There is enough material here a feisty, independent lead searching for answers, reminiscent of Star Wars's Rey, and a richly imagined alternate world to support a potential series.
