The Queen of Attolia

by Megan Whalen Turner Narrated by Steve West

Overview

Discover and rediscover the world of the Queen's Thief, from the acclaimed novel The Thief to the thrilling, twenty-years-in-the-making conclusion, The Return of the Thief. The epic novels set in the world of the Queen's Thief can be read in any order.

New York Times-bestselling author Megan Whalen Turner's entrancing and award-winning Queen's Thief novels bring to life the world of the epics and feature one of the most charismatic and incorrigible characters of fiction, Eugenides the thief. Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief novels are rich with political machinations and intrigue, battles lost and won, dangerous journeys, divine intervention, power, passion, revenge, and deception. Perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo, Marie Lu, Patrick Rothfuss, and George R. R. Martin.

The brilliant thief Eugenides has visited the Queen of Attolia's palace one too many times, leaving small tokens and then departing unseen. When his final excursion does not go as planned, he is captured by the ruthless queen. The Queen's Thief novels have been praised by writers, critics, reviewers, and fans and have been honored with glowing reviews, “best of” citations, and numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Newbery Honor, the Andre Norton Award shortlist, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award.

A Booklist Top 10 Fantasy Books for Youth

ALA Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults
A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age
Parent's Choice Gold Award
A Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books Blue Ribbon Book

“The Queen's Thief books awe and inspire me. They have the feel of a secret, discovered history of real but forgotten lands. The plot-craft is peerless, the revelations stunning, and the characters flawed, cunning, heartbreaking, exceptional. Megan Whalen Turner's books have a permanent spot on my favorites shelf, with space waiting for more books to come.”-Laini Taylor, New York Times-bestselling author of the Daughter of Smoke and Bone novels and Strange the Dreamer

""Unforgettable characters, plot twists that will make your head spin, a world rendered in elegant detail-you will fall in love with every page of these stories. Megan Whalen Turner writes vivid, immersive, heartbreaking fantasy that will leave you desperate to return to Attolia again and again.”-Leigh Bardugo, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom

“Megan Whalen Turner proves to be one of the brightest creative talents. With each book, she continues to add new levels and new luster to her sparkling imagination.”-Lloyd Alexander, Newbery Medalist and National Book Award-winning author of The Chronicles of Prydain

“Readers will be spellbound.”-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Turner's storytelling is so sure that readers will want to go along with her-and discover whatever it is that Eugenides will do next.”-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[An] intense read . . . thoroughly involving and wholly satisfying on all fronts.”-The Horn Book (starred review)

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This spellbinder of a sequel to the Newbery Honor-winning The Thief is every bit as devilishly well plotted and grandly conceived. As it opens, Eugenides the thief has fallen into the clutches of the queen of Attolia, who still seethes from his besting of her (relayed in The Thief). Unwilling to execute him, lest she start a war with the queen of Eddis (Eugenides's cousin and ruler), she orders his hand cut off. The drama is high, and the action grows only more engrossing. As Eugenides tries to reconcile himself to the amputation, war breaks out, involving Attolia, Eddis and Sounis, tiny countries modeled on ancient Greece and other Mediterranean nations. For the most part, Turner eschews battle scenes, although she executes these with flair. Instead, she emphasizes strategy, with brilliant, ever-deceptive Eugenides a match for Odysseus in his wiliness and daring, perpetually catching readers by surprise. When, fairly late in the novel, Eugenides decides that he must wed the fearsome queen of Attolia in order to achieve a more lasting peace--and that he loves her--it requires a certain leap of faith to accept that his terror of her coexists with desire. But Turner's storytelling is so sure that readers will want to go along with her--and discover whatever it is that Eugenides will do next. Ages 10-up. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

School Library Journal

Gr 6-10-This sequel to The Thief (Greenwillow, 1996) begins promisingly enough. Eugenides, the Thief of Eddis, is caught spying on the Queen of Attolia. She orders his right hand cut off and sends him home fever-ridden and near death. However, Attolia's decision not to hang the Thief comes back to haunt her. Aside from the young man's personal travails, the story involves several kingdoms, all trying to gain ascendancy in the territory, and willing to go to war to do so. It is here that the exciting plot slows to a crawl, with lengthy and tedious descriptions of battle plans and strategic maneuverings. What evolves, very slowly, is a plan for Eugenides to steal the Queen of Attolia and take her to Eddis. It almost works; meanwhile, readers learn that Eugenides is hopelessly in love with her. His rival for her affections is a foreign minister of a kingdom that plans to conquer the entire area. However, Attolia sees through the ambassador's ruse and makes short work of him. It is the question of whether she can possibly return Eugenides's affections that will keep readers turning the pages. Attolia is the ultimate strong-willed, self-sufficient young woman. Eugenides is less strong and self-assured than he was in The Thief, which is understandable given his ordeal. His obsession with Attolia is less believable. He knows her mostly from distant observations and she is responsible for his dismemberment. In the end, this is a story of love and war in which love wins out. It is sure to find readers among admirers of the first book.-Bruce Anne Shook, Mendenhall Middle School, Greensboro, NC Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Mark Oppenheimer

The characters are distinct and moving: we can feel a magus's wisdom, the Mede ambassador's treachery and especially Eugenides's self-loathing for having brought on this war...The Queen of Attolia is a book to turn children into readers...
—The New York Times Book Review

Book

A plot twist sets the obvious on its head and leads to an unexpected conclusion. Scheming, spying, thieving, and fighting fill the pages of this cleverly plotted, enjoyable tale.

The Horn Book (starred review)

The intense read is thoroughly involving and wholly satisfying on all fronts.

Lloyd Alexander

Megan Whalen Turner proves to be one of the brightest creative talents. With each book, she continues to add new levels and new lustre to her sparkling imagination.

Joelle Charbonneau

Megan Whalen Turner has constructed a clever world filled with suspense and intrigue and characters that will never be forgotten. Once you dive into the world of the Queen’s Thief [books], prepare to have your life stolen from you until you finish them all.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170124855
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Series:	Queen's Thief Series , #2
Edition description:	Unabridged
Age Range:	10 - 13 Years

Read an Excerpt

Queen of Attolia, The EPB

Chapter One

He was asleep, but woke at the sound of the key turning in the lock. The storage room held winter linens, and no one should have been interested in it in the middle of summer, and certainly not in the middle of the night. By the time the door was open, he had slipped through a square hole in the stones of the wall and soundlessly closed the metal door that covered it. He was in the narrow tunnel that connected a stoking room to the hypocaust of a minor audience chamber down the corridor. The door he'd crawled through was intended to allow smoke into the storage room to fumigate the linens. Moving quietly, he inched down the tunnel to the open space of the hypocaust. Squat pillars held the stone floor above him. There wasn't room to sit up, so he lay on his back and listened to the thumping noises, like drumbeats, as people hurried across the floor of the audience chamber over his head. They could only be looking for him, but he wasn't particularly worried. He'd hidden before in the spaces under the floors of the palace. His ancestors had used the tunnels of the hypocausts to hide in since the invaders had built them to heat their new buildings hundreds of years earlier.

Noises traveled down the long, narrow tunnel from the stoking room: shuffling thumps and a crackle that he strained his ears to hear. A fire was being lit in the furnace chamber. Soon the warm air and, of more concern to him, the smoke would be fanned into the hypocaust to warm the audience room above and drive the quarry out. Silently, in the pitch-dark, he moved between the brick pillars to a wall and then along it to a flue in thewall with an opening slightly larger than the others. Even with the enlarged opening, it was not an easy task to fit himself into the narrow vent, and while he maneuvered, the warm, smoky air blew around him. He remembered how easily he had slipped into the flue the first time he'd tried it. His grandfather, who'd brought him to the palace, had grown too old and too big for most of the passages and had had to stay at an inn in the town while his grandson explored on his own, finding everything just as he'd heard it described.

Once inside the flue, he wedged his fingers into cracks and braced himself with his feet to climb until the space turned at an angle to join the chimney above the audience room. When he reached the chimney, he cursed silently, though what he found was no more than he should have expected. There was a fire in the hearth below. Fortunately they hadn't already had a roaring blaze going when they chased him out of the linen room. They must have just lighted the fire, but the air in the chimney was smoky and quickly growing hot. With no other choice, the thief climbed into the chimney and moved up it as quickly as he could, relying on the sound of the fire to cover the sounds his soft boots made on the ridged bricks of the walls. The chimney was much wider than the flue, and the ridged bricks were intended to be climbed easily by sweepers.

He went on until he reached an intersection where several chimneys came together into a much larger one that rose to the roof of the palace. The chimney was warm and filled with smoke, but instead of climbing it, he turned to another opening and climbed down. He guessed that the queen had soldiers posted on the roof of the palace to watch the openings of the chimneys.

He breathed shallowly and slowly, stifling a need to cough. Any sound might betray him. As he dropped lower in the chimney he'd chosen, the smoke grew thicker, his eyes watered, and he missed a handhold and slid down with a thump to a ledge below. He sucked in a lungful of smoke and then covered his mouth with both hands while his face turned red and the blood pounded in his ears. The breath trickled out between his fingers and he breathed in again more cautiously, but his throat burned and his head swam. His breath came and went in huffs of suppressed coughs.

He was on a ledge where the chimney divided into smaller flues that led down to several different rooms. He closed his eyes and listened for sounds, but there was no shouting, only the muted crackling of the fire somewhere below. He poked his head into one chimney after another, debating with himself before choosing one he hoped led to the stateroom of some foreign ambassador too prestigious to be disturbed in the middle of the night by soldiers wanting to light an unnecessary fire in his hearth.

The chimney he chose descended from the main one in a long, shallow slope. Once he was away from the main chimney, the air was free of smoke and he stopped to draw grateful breaths until his head cleared. When he reached the turn where the chimney dropped straight to the hearth below, he paused and settled himself to wait. There was no sign of a fire laid underneath him, so there was no immediate need to get down, and he thought it best to be sure there was no one waiting for him in the room below. After a long silence he heard the creak of a bed as if its occupant had shifted in his sleep.

Queen of Attolia, The EPB. Copyright © by Megan Turner. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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