Demonstrating world-building finesse, Robin Hobb begins the climatic story of a seafaring clan and its tangled destiny. Though expected to inherit her family's newly quickened liveship, Althea Vestrit loses the honor to her scheming brother-in-law, who plans to use it as a slave ship. The ruthless pirate Captain Kennit also sees a captured liveship as his key to success. Soon Althea is forced to fight both men to regain the animate, intelligent liveship, her family's most treasured possession.
"A truly extraordinary saga . . . The characterizations are consistently superb, and Hobb] animates everything with love for and knowledge of the sea."--Booklist

Bingtown is a hub of exotic trade and home to a merchant nobility famed for its liveships--rare vessels carved from wizardwood, which ripens magically into sentient awareness. Now the fortunes of one of Bingtown's oldest families rest on the newly awakened liveship Vivacia.

For Althea Vestrit, the ship is her rightful legacy. For Althea's young nephew, wrenched from his religious studies and forced to serve aboard the ship, the Vivacia is a life sentence. But the fate of the ship--and the Vestrits--may ultimately lie in the hands of an outsider: the ruthless buccaneer captain Kennit, who plans to seize power over the Pirate Isles by capturing a liveship and bending it to his will.

Praise for Robin Hobb and the Liveship Traders Trilogy

"Fantasy as it ought to be written . . . Robin Hobb's books are diamonds in a sea of zircons."--George R. R. Martin

"A major work of high fantasy, reading like a cross between Tolkien and Patrick O'Brian . . . one of the finest fantasy sagas to bridge the millennium."--Publishers Weekly

"Rich, complex . . . Hobb's] plotting is complex but tightly controlled, and her descriptive powers match her excellent visual imagination. But her chief virtue is that she delineates character extremely well."--Interzone