City of Stairs
core novel 2014 The Divine Cities
Record
| First published | 2014 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.10 (43,442 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| Page count | 452 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780804137171 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
City of Stairs, published in 2014, opens Robert Jackson Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy in the city-state of Bulikov, once a dominant power ruled through the direct intervention of its patron gods, who granted its people miraculous abilities. Decades earlier, the neighboring, long-subjugated nation of Saypur rose up, killed those gods, and conquered Bulikov, leaving the city stripped of its divine magic and reduced in status. When a Saypuri historian researching Bulikov's suppressed religious history and the vanished gods is murdered, the Saypuri government sends the operative Shara Komayd, posing as a minor diplomat, to investigate. Shara's inquiry draws her into the tangled, resentful politics of a conquered city still haunted by the memory of its former divine power, as she works to uncover what really happened to the historian and why.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Divine Cities
- Series: The Divine Cities core; position 1 of 3 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert Jackson Bennett
Awards (verified)
- Locus Award (Best Fantasy Novel (reader poll)), 2015: finalist; Locus reader poll placement: 2nd place.
- World Fantasy Award (Novel), 2015: nominated
- British Fantasy Award (Best Fantasy Novel (Robert Holdstock Award)), 2015: nominated
Notes
- From the series record (The Divine Cities): Core Canon = all 3 novels of the completed trilogy (Broadway Books, 2014-2017). No companion/Expanded Canon material found (no novellas, no short fiction set in this world) -- the trilogy is the complete work. First-edition dates per Wikipedia's own per-book articles, cross-checked against sfadb's Locus poll year attributions (each book's poll year is the year after its publication year, consistent with all three dates).
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 Divine Cities: position 1 of 3: next City of Blades (2016)
Sources
- Wikipedia: The Divine Cities
- Wikipedia: City of Stairs
- Wikipedia: City of Blades
- sfadb: Robert Jackson Bennett
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