Stranger at the Barrow Gate

Book One of The Strangers’ Way Trilogy

Some doors are not meant to open from the other side.

In the southern salt-villages of Eæth, the barrow-folk keep the dead the way their lineage always has — with salt, with sigil, with patient sacred work that has held the dark in its place for longer than memory. Wensh has lived at the edge of one such village his whole life: not kin, not quite a stranger, tolerated and unplaced.

When a wounded man and a silent child arrive at the barrow gate out of the north, the binding fails — and in the night that follows, Wensh does something an outsider was never meant to be able to do. It saves the village. It also makes him impossible to keep.

Stranger at the Barrow Gate is the first volume of The Strangers’ Way, a complete weird-fantasy trilogy that carries one exile from the burning south of Eæth to its frozen north. For readers of Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, and C.J. Cherryh — austere, immersive, and strange in the oldest sense.

The village that took him in is about to turn him out. The road is waiting

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