Imaro
core novel 1981 Imaro
Record
| First published | 1981 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.91 (949 ratings, collected 2026-08-28) |
| Page count | 256 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780879976675 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
Imaro is a sword and sorcery novel by Charles R. Saunders, first published by DAW Books in 1981 and later revised. Set on the fictional, Africa-inspired continent of Nyumbani, it follows the warrior Imaro, who is raised among the Ilyassai people but never fully accepted by them after breaking a tribal taboo that separates him from his mother and marks him as an outsider from birth. Structured as a sequence of interconnected episodes rather than a single continuous plot, the novel traces Imaro's growth from a scorned, half-tolerated youth into a formidable warrior as he leaves his home tribe and travels across Nyumbani, confronting human enemies, supernatural threats, and powerful forces whose designs against him predate his own birth.
Where it sits
- Universe: Imaro
- Series: Imaro core; position 1 of 4 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Charles R. Saunders
Notes
- From the series record (Imaro): Founding work of the 'Sword and Soul' subgenre: African-inspired heroic fantasy created explicitly as an alternative to the genre's default pseudo-medieval-European settings. No award wins or nominations could be independently corroborated for this series; it is admitted on documented genre-historical significance (the first African-diaspora sword-and-sorcery hero in the genre, widely cited as founding a subgenre later authors built on) rather than an award record.
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 Imaro: position 1 of 4: next The Quest for Cush (1984)
Sources
← Imaro dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.