The Girl and the Moon

Mark Lawrence

Apr 2022 · The Book of the Ice Book 3 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Helen Duff

About this audiobook

In the third exhilarating novel in this dazzling epic fantasy series, a young outcast will fight against staggering odds to save her world.

On the planet Abeth, a narrow Corridor of green land is surrounded on all sides by ice plains where only the strong survive. Ice triber Yaz has completed a perilous journey and arrived at the Corridor, and it exceeds and overwhelms all of her expectations. Everything seems different but some constants remain: her old enemies are still two steps ahead, bent on her destruction. She makes her way to the Convent of Sweet Mercy, where nuns train young girls who show the old gifts, but like the Corridor itself the convent is packed with peril and opportunity. Yaz has much to learn from the nuns—if they don’t decide to execute her.

The fate of everyone squeezed between the Corridor’s vast walls, and ultimately the fate of those laboring to survive out on ice itself, hangs from the moon, and the battle to save the moon centers on the Ark of the Missing, buried beneath the emperor’s palace. Everyone wants Yaz to be the key that will open the Ark – the one the wise have sought for generations. But sometimes wanting isn’t enough.

Ratings and reviews

Lawrence's plot is, as usual, meticulously built, and laid out for the reader through engaging storytelling, but what I always find myself most drawn to is the characters and the journeys they travel to reach their destinations. In this conclusion of _The Book of the Ice_ trilogy, he fleshes out the relationships between and among these characters and those of _The Book of the Ancestor_, as well as showing how the challenges faced by each set of characters are part of a larger, overarching struggle.

excellent conclusion to the trilogy, Mark Lawrence remains one of my favorite authors in modern fantasy

About the author

Mark Lawrence was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, to British parents but moved to the UK at the age of one. After earning a PhD in mathematics at Imperial College London, he went back to the US to work on a variety of research projects, including the “Star Wars” missile-defense program. Since returning to the UK, he has worked mainly on image processing and decision/reasoning theory. He never had any ambition to be a writer, so he was very surprised when a half-hearted attempt to find an agent turned into a global publishing deal overnight. His first trilogy, The Broken Empire, has been universally acclaimed as a groundbreaking work of fantasy, and both Emperor of Thorns and The Liar’s Key have won the David Gemmell Legend Award for best fantasy novel. Mark is married, with four children, and lives in Bristol.