[The Dreamquest Trilogy 01] • The Dreamthief's Daughter

The first new "Eternal Champion" novel in ten years and a major fantasy publishing event, "The Dreamthief's Daughter" continues the highly successful Elrick Saga. The Count Ulric von Bek meets a figure known to him only in dreams--Elrick of Melnibon, the wandering Prince of Ruins. Somehow the same person, yet separate, their very beings fuse spectacularly. Now the never-ending struggle between Law and Chaos must be fought in both their universes.

Amazon.com ReviewIn the elaborate fictional cosmos Michael Moorcock has created, Elric and the various vonBeks are all aspects of the Eternal Champion who fights for the Balance, preventing both Law and Chaos from dominating the universe and trapping it in either barren sterility or pointless fecundity. Elric, the albino sorcerer and last prince of the inhuman empire of Melnibone, was the creation of Moorcock's adventurous pot-boiling inventive youth, just as the vonBek family featured in the heroic fantasies of his more thoughtful middle-life.

In The Dreamthief's Daughter, he brings together Elric and Ulric vonBek, last scion of the family, and we finally learn the sin for which the perpetual villain Gaynor the Damned was doomed: Nazi occultists are searching for the Grail and the Black Sword and must be prevented from attaining them. Ulric seeks allies wherever he can find them, including Oona, who wanders through dream realities and with whom he falls in love. This is fast-moving phantasmagorical stuff with ambiguously virtuous heroes and baddies whose villainy and charm is total. Moorcock's immensely powerful visual imagination and sense of the innate drama of crucial scenes make this a breathtaking read. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers WeeklyIn this latest installment in his multivolume saga of the Eternal Champion, Moorcock (War Amongst the Angels) teams his favorite hero, the melancholy albino swordsman Elric of Melnibon?, with Count Ulric von Bek, the last in a line of German noblemen who have made several previous appearances in the series. War is in the offing, and Hitler, having learned that the von Bek family may own both an enchanted sword and the Holy Grail itself, sends SS Major Gaynor von Minct to take possession of these mystical relics so they may be used to further the cause of the Third Reich. Von Bek and Gaynor, however, are merely the current earthly avatars of the Eternal Champion and one of his greatest foes; they are knights fighting in the causes, respectively, of Chaos and Law, in innumerable, gorgeously described, alternate realities. Von Bek and Elric, aided by the book's title character, a female archer who can take the shape of a white hare, must confront a variety of gods and monsters in an effort to preserve the balance of the Multiverse, which stands in dire danger of falling under Gaynor's control. Over the years Moorcock has produced a number of highly original genre and mainstream novels. In the Eternal Champion series, however, he has essentially been writing well-done variations on the same story for decades, gradually polishing his stylistic skill and occasionally making veiled allusions to contemporary political events. There's nothing particularly new here, but fans of the series should enjoy this addition. (Apr. 11)