City of Last Chances
core novel 2022 The Tyrant Philosophers
Record
| First published | 2022 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.94 (10,614 ratings, collected 2026-08-29) |
| Page count | 500 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781801108423 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
City of Last Chances opens in Ilmar, a city long known as a place where people go to be hidden or to start over, now occupied by the foreign Palleseen Sway, a rationalist regime that enforces strict order over the population it has conquered. The Palleseen keep a tight grip on the city even as unrest simmers beneath the surface and the population edges toward open revolt. Rather than following a single hero, the novel moves among a range of the city's inhabitants, among them a priest serving an obscure and struggling god, an idealistic student, a cynical scholar, a black-market fixer, and a mysterious fighter, whose separate lives intersect as tensions rise. Looming over the city is the Anchorwood, a strange and unstable forest from which few who enter ever return, adding a further source of uncertainty as Ilmar edges closer to rebellion.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Tyrant Philosophers
- Series: The Tyrant Philosophers core; position 1 of 4 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Awards (verified)
- British Science Fiction Association Award (Best Novel), 2023: won; Awarded to City of Last Chances.
Notes
- From the series record (The Tyrant Philosophers): A sequence of loosely connected novels following the Palleseen, a militarised empire of ideological "perfectionists", as their occupation spreads across a series of very different cities. Each book largely follows new viewpoint characters in a new setting, tied together by the Palleseen war machine and a recurring cast of officers and agents rather than one single continuous plot.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series The Tyrant Philosophers: position 1 of 4: next House of Open Wounds (2023)
Sources
← The Tyrant Philosophers dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.