Jack Vance

The long awaited audiobook sequel to Gene Wolfe's four-volume classic, The Book of the New Sun. Listeners return to the world of Severian, now the Autarch of Urth, as he leaves the planet on one of the huge spaceships of the alien Hierodules to travel across time and space to face his greatest test, to become the legendary New Sun or die.

Through the dim forest came Liane the Wayfarer, passing along the shadowed glades with a prancing light-footed gait. He whistled, he caroled, he was plainly in high spirits. Around his finger he twirled a bit of wrought bronze—a circlet graved with angular crabbed characters, now stained black. By excellent chance he had found it, banded around the root of an ancient yew.

A blast from the past this one, 1996 to be precise, and another in the SF Masterworks series. There are times when this book reads like a ghost story, other times an SF novel and occasionally a boy’s own adventure. It’s also one of those books in which you can see the modern world portrayed in all its nastiness, and humanity in all its variety. Jaro was found by two academics, being beaten by a group of youngsters on another world.