Tress of the Emerald Sea
Brandon Sanderson, 2023
Fantasy RomanceContemporary fiction
A wry, fairy-tale fantasy about a girl who sails past the edge of her small world—and a narrator who keeps interrupting with truths about fear, memory, and work.
Feels like curiosity and wonder. About adventure, identity and freedom.
A page from the book
How much of your character is just a container you were poured into?
We want to imagine that people are consistent, steady, stable. We define who they are, create descriptions to lock them on a page, divide them up by their likes, talents, beliefs. Then we pretend some—perhaps most—are better than we are, because they stick to their definitions, while we never quite fit ours. Truth is, people are as fluid as time is. We adapt to our situation like water in a strangely shaped jug, though it might take us a little while to ooze into all the little nooks. Because we adapt, we sometimes don’t recognize how twisted, uncomfortable, or downright wrong the container is that we’ve been told to inhabit. Brandon Sanderson.Sanderson wrote four secret novels during the pandemic; this one, inspired by The Princess Bride, was the first of them released.
Books that feel like this
More by Brandon Sanderson
Mistborn
Brandon Sanderson, 2006
A street thief who burns metals for luck is pulled into a heist against a god-emperor—and a world buried in ash.
The Well of Ascension
Brandon Sanderson, 2007
A young Mistborn and a scholar-king try to hold a freed city together while an army gathers outside and old prophecy starts to look like a trap.
The Way of Kings
Brandon Sanderson, 2015
When a young scholar challenges ancient religious doctrine, they force a confrontation between faith, logic, and the true nature of divinity. A sweeping epic of idealism and intellectual defiance.
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- What is Tress of the Emerald Sea like?
- Feels like curiosity and wonder. About adventure, identity and freedom.
- What should I read after Tress of the Emerald Sea?
- If you liked Tress of the Emerald Sea, try The Lincoln Highway (Amor Towles), The Lost Bookshop (Evie Woods) and The Golden Compass (Philip Pullman).
A taste of the feed
What a photograph holds that the people standing in it can't see.
The funny thing about a picture, thought Woolly, the funny thing about a picture is that while it knows everything that’s happened up until the moment it’s been taken, it knows absotively nothing about what will happen next. And yet, once the picture has been framed and hung on a wall, what you see when you look at it closely are all the things that were about to happen. All the un-things. The things that were unanticipated. And unintended. And unreversible.
The Lincoln Highway · Amor Towles
The books on your shelf are proof that something survives.
I couldn’t explain it, not even to myself, but books gave me an unflinching sense of stability and groundedness. That because words survived, somehow I would too.
The Lost Bookshop · Evie Woods
What a lethal machine does with its evenings when nobody is watching.
I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.
All Systems Red · Martha Wells
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed