Ganil raised his head. The crowd was drifting away; the young priest knelt on the pavement by him, praying and sobbing aloud. Ganil glanced up at the heavy sky and then set off alone through the streets of the city and out through the city gate, northward, into exile and towards his home.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

URSULA K. LE GUIN was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, and lives in Portland, Oregon. She has published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many honors and awards including the Hugo, Nebula, PEN-Malamud, and National Book Awards, as well as the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

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PRAISE FOR URSULA K. LE GUIN AND THE WIND’S TWELVE QUARTERS

“There is no writer with an imagination as forceful and delicate as Ursula Le Guin’s.”

—Grace Paley

“[Le Guin] wields her pen with a moral psychological sophistication rarely seen . . . she writes fables: splendidly intricate and hugely imaginative tales.”

—Newsweek

“Ursula K. Le Guin fashions ideas like a goldsmith: intricate, involved, and confident. Her prose sparkles like sunlight on water.”

—Chicago News

“An elegant writer, deft with the poetry of language.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

“Ursula Le Guin’s prose breathes light and intelligence. She can lift fiction to the level of poetry and compress it to the density of allegory.”

—Jonathan Lethem

“[Le Guin’s] work transcends the usual limitations of the genre.”

—The New Yorker

“An important writer, period.”

—Washington Post

“She is a splendid short-story writer. . . . Fiction, like Borges’s, that finds its life in the interstices between the borders of speculative fiction and realism.”

—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

“For sheer depth of imagination Ursula K. Le Guin has few rivals in American literature today. . . . Like Borges, she is an original, a consummately unique storyteller.”

—Judith Freeman

“Le Guin’s powerful work illustrates that fantasy need not be escapist, that gender studies need not be dry or strident, and that entertainment need not be mindless.”

—The Onion

“In recent years, no [writer] inside the field of science fiction or outside of it [has] done more to create a modern conscience.”

—New Republic

“Le Guin is as good as any contemporary at creating worlds, imaginary or our own.”

—Time

“I don’t know anyone else who can do what Le Guin does. Her work is simple and brilliantly clear, like a Buddha’s laugh: joyfully serious, delighted with the joke that is life. Le Guin writes about love, pure and simple—love and all the ways in which it refuses to be bound—and she does so beautifully.”

—Nicola Griffith