The Eye of the World
The launch of the genre's bestselling post-Tolkien saga (ninety-plus million copies): for the 1990s, this was what 'epic fantasy' meant, and Amazon's 2021 series renewed the franchise for another generation.
Book Entry · Fantasy
The Shadow Rising
by Robert Jordan · 1992 · The Wheel of Time, book 4
What is The Shadow Rising about?
No Last-Battle skirmish, no single quest: Jordan's fourth volume forks the saga into the structure it keeps thereafter. Rand, newly proclaimed Dragon Reborn, walks into the Aiel Waste and through the glass columns of Rhuidean — the series' finest sequence, an ancestral memory-descent revealing the Aiel's buried pacifist past and the age-old lie at the heart of their identity. Perrin goes home to defend the Two Rivers and becomes the lord he swore not to be; Egwene apprentices to dream; the White Tower splits. The book where the Wheel of Time's true subject — how histories are forgotten, distorted and weaponised — comes fully into view.
Why it matters
The consensus pick for the saga's best volume: the Rhuidean chapters are bench-mark worldbuilding, cited across the field as the standard for revelation-through-history.
Where does it sit in the series?
Fourteen volumes, four million words: the Dragon Reborn, the tainted One Power and the Last Battle, completed after Jordan's death by Brandon Sanderson. Epic fantasy's largest single structure.
In the Guide from The Wheel of Time:
- The Eye of the World (1990)
- The Shadow Rising (1992)
Read next
Assassin's Apprentice
The opening of the Realm of the Elderlings, modern fantasy's great life-study: the book that put first-person psychological interiority at the centre of the epic form, with a generation of writers following.
The Blade Itself
Grimdark's defining debut: the close-voice, blackly comic register it established is now the house style of adult fantasy, and Glokta is the subgenre's signature creation.