Robin Hobb is at peace. Last year, she put the final touches to a twenty-year long literary project: the intertwined stories of the Realm of the Elderlings, the fantasy epic that sold over a million copies. The 16-book series, divided into five parts, ran over two decades, starting with Assassin’s Apprentice (1995) and ending with Assassin’s Fate (2017). Over the course of 20 years, four trilogies and one quartet, characters from one book could re-appear in another, creating an ever-expanding web of complex societies, secret family lines, buried cities and uncharted islands. George RR Martin, with whom Hobb shares an editor, described her books as “diamonds in a sea of zircons”.
“The last books of the Farseer were very hard for me to write, very emotional. For a year, I stopped writing,” Hobb, 66, told the New Statesman at the Imaginales festival in Epinal, France, in May. Fans had travelled from Lille, in the north of France, and Marseilles, in the far south, to meet the author.
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