Cast your mind back to 2019, before everything fell apart, and the worst collective trauma we were experiencing was the Game of Thrones season finale. As a massive fan of fantasy literature and George R.R. Martin’s brilliant A Song of Ice and Fire novels, I was obsessed with the first few seasons of GOT. However, sitting in 2019 watching a certain character plot convenience their way to the Iron Throne, I decided that a new epic fantasy world was needed in my life.
This is where Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy book The Eye of the World, the first in his The Wheel of Time series, enters the chat. The Eye of the World follows Rand Al’Thor, a farm boy from The Two Rivers who is uprooted when the forces of the Dark One attacks his village. Moiraine, a member of a shadowy cabal of sorceresses known as the Aes Sedai, takes Rand and his friends away from the Two Rivers. Among these friends, she believes one might be the reincarnation of the Dragon, an ancient hero and powerful battlemage who is prophesied to either save the world or destroy it.
Whilst The Eye of the World is not the best book in the series, perhaps because some of the later books The Shadow Rising and The Fires of Heaven are the absolute zenith of epic fantasy literature, it is an excellent coming of age fantasy in the vein of J.R.R. Tolkien and the beginning of an absolutely glorious journey. Unlike many other fantasy series’ *cough* Patrick Rothfuss *cough* George R.R. Martin, The Wheel of Time is a completed series with a fantastic finale A Memory of Light. So if you’re worried about starting a series that will never be completed, rest assured that Robert Jordan will not disappoint. With a huge budget adaptation coming from Amazon at the end of the year, now is the perfect time to take the plunge and dive into Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time.
