Riftwar Saga

About the Riftwar Saga series

Pug is an orphaned kitchen boy on the estate of the Duke of Crydee when an alien race, the Tsurani, tears open an interdimensional rift and invades his home world of Midkemia, dragging him into a war between worlds and a magical destiny he never chose. Magician introduces Feist's world-spanning epic in two halves -- Pug's captivity and magical awakening on the invaders' home world of Kelewan, and his friend Tomas's rise among an ancient, godlike race back on Midkemia -- before Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon widen the scope into court intrigue, a hunt for a cure to a magical poison, and a final confrontation with an ancient evil threatening to unmake both worlds.

Published across the 1980s, the Riftwar Saga is the foundational trilogy of Feist's Riftwar Cycle, a body of work that would eventually span more than a dozen further trilogies and duologies across four decades. It set the template the rest of the Cycle follows: sweeping, multi-book plots; a cast that ages and grows across volumes rather than resetting; and a habit of following secondary characters -- Pug's son, apprentices, entirely new generations -- once the founding heroes' story is told. New readers to the whole Cycle should start here; almost everything that follows assumes you already know Pug, Tomas, and the world of Midkemia.

How to read this series

Read in publication order: Magician, Silverthorn, A Darkness at Sethanon. Magician is a genuinely enormous opening volume (US mass-market paperback editions split it into two books, Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master, but it's a single novel either way), and the two sequels follow directly from its ending, so there's no meaningful alternative order. This trilogy is the mandatory starting point for the entire Riftwar Cycle -- every later series (Empire, Serpentwar, Darkwar, and beyond) assumes you've read at least this much.