"Samatar's sensual descriptions create a rich, strange landscape, allowing a lavish adventure to unfold that is haunting and unforgettable." -- Library Journal (*starred review*) "Sofia Samatar has an expansive imagination, a poetic and elegant style, and she writes stories so rich, with characters so full of life, they haunt you long after the story ends. A real pleasure." --Chris Abani, author of  GraceLand  and  The Virgin of Flames "A book about the love of books. Her sentences are intoxicating and one can easily be lost in their intricacy. Samatar's beautifully written book is one that will be treasured by book lovers everywhere." --Raul M. Chapa, BookPeople, Austin, TX "Thoroughly engaging and thoroughly original.

A story of ghosts and books, treachery and mystery, ingeniously conceived and beautifully written. One of the best fantasy novels I've read in recent years."--Jeffrey Ford, author of The Girl in the Glass "Mesmerizing--a sustained and dreamy enchantment. A Stranger in Olondria reminds both Samatar's characters and her readers of the way stories make us long for far-away, even imaginary, places and how they also bring us home again." --Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves "Gorgeous writing, beautiful and sensual and so precise--a Proustian ghost story." --Paul Witcover, author of Tumbling After "Let the world take note of this dazzling and accomplished fantasy. Sofia Samatar's debut novel is both exhilarating epic adventure and loving invocation of what it means to live through story, poetry, language. She writes like the heir of Ursula K.

Le Guin and Gene Wolfe." --Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners "Imagine an inlaid cabinet, its drawers within drawers filled with spices, roses, amulets, bright cities, bones, and shadows.  Sofia Samatar is a merchant of wonders, and her A Stranger in Olondria is a bookshop of dreams." --Greer Gilman, author of Cloud & Ashes.