The Last Wish

The Last Wish

by Andrzej Sapkowski
[cover name=thelastwish]

Geralt de Rivia is a witcher, a monster hunter who uses magic, alchemy, his sword, and his brain to deal with dangerous creatures. He works as a mercenary, and he has a quirky sense of right and wrong. He has no problem killing three guys who attack him in a bar, for example, but he won’t immediately try to kill every supernatural menace he encounters. In this world, humans are often more evil than monsters, so maybe the person who hired Geralt is the villain and the creature Geralt has been hired to kill isn’t.

The Last Wish is a series of connected short stories. Geralt is recovering from his wounds in a temple, and the stories are flashbacks or stories he shares with people there.

This isn’t traditional heroic fantasy. As I said before, Geralt has a strange code of ethics, and sometimes he is tricked by a bad person into doing the wrong thing. The setting is kind of dark and gritty. The old, magical world is dying, and the new world is dominated by humans. People come to the wilderness, start new towns, and drive the monsters away. There is no one big bad out to conquer or destroy the world. Instead, we have evil humans and monsters facing extinction and trying to fight back.

There are some sexual situations in the story (including some in the first two pages), but most of it is only alluded to.

This is part of a larger series, which includes the TV series The Hexer (forget about the movie), several novels, some graphic novels, and a video game called The Witcher. The stories were all originally written in Polish; most, but not all, of the stories have been translated into English.

You can read some of the book online at the publisher’s website.

Where to Find It

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