15. A little (un)helpful guide to the Witcher books

Today I’d like to make something clear. After CD Project Red’s overwhelming success promoting the Witcher games, particularly the third one (The Witcher 3 Wild hunt) some people learned about Andrzej Sapkowski and his books. Some fans of the game(s) confuse them with game related adaptations. In Sapkowski’s opinion this is caused by publishing houses which use images from the games as covers for his books (actually, it bothers him a lot). So first of all : no, Sapkowski’s books are not adaptations; these are children of his imagination, sacrifice, intellect and talent. There are quite a lot of them. If you’re interested in them and find yourself too lazy to go check the Wikipedia, I’ll willingly explain to you in what order you should read all of them and why.

I. The Last Wish

Don’t be fooled by its title, this is your number one. The Last Wish is the first collection of short stories which you shouldn’t omit if you want to understand characters appearing in the saga and their relations properly. It consists of seven chapters: The Voice of Reason, The Witcher, A Grain of Truth, The Lesser Evil, A Question of Price, The Edge of the World and finally The Last Wish. There are several references to them in the Witcher saga. What’s more, there are all exquisite in terms of language. 

II. Sword of Destiny

This is the second colletion of short stories featuring Geralt of Rivia as its main protagonist. There are six chapters this time: The Bounds of Reason, A Shard of Ice, Eternal Flame, A Little Sacrifice, The Sword of Destiny and Something more. Again, we can learn something interesting about the characters. Here Sapkowski introduces one of the most important characters of the future pentalogy, as well.

III. The Witcher saga

The pentalogy begins and Blood of Elves is its first volume. One can argue that this is also a continuation for one of the short stories from the previous publication. The following volumes are Time of Contempt, Baptism of Fire, The Tower of the Swallow and Lady of the Lake.

IV. Season of Storms

This book was published many years after Lady of the Lake. Sapkowski goes back in time to the short stories and focuses on developing a subplot mentioned in one of them. You can definitely check this out.

If you feel interested, go and let yourself be devoured by Sapkowski’s unique style and Geralt’s adventures. If not, well, let's just say you don’t even know how great your loss really is. ;)

Peace out