Ship of Magic
core novel 1998 Realm of the Elderlings
Record
| First published | 1998 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.25 (115,744 ratings, collected 2026-09-11) |
| Page count | 880 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780553103243 |
Synopsis
The Vestrit family of the trading city of Bingtown owns Vivacia, a sentient liveship grown from magical wizardwood that only fully awakens after the deaths of three generations of family owners aboard her. When the family patriarch dies at the start of the novel, his daughter Althea expects to inherit command of the ship, but it instead passes to her sister's husband, Kyle, who steers the newly awakened vessel into the increasingly lucrative and morally fraught slave trade. Elsewhere along the coast, an ambitious pirate captain named Kennit schemes to unite the scattered pirate settlements by capturing a liveship of his own, setting in motion rivalries that will ripple through Bingtown's fragile trade economy.
Where it sits
- Universe: Realm of the Elderlings
- Series: Liveship Traders Trilogy core; position 1 of 3 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robin Hobb
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series Liveship Traders Trilogy: position 1 of 3: next The Mad Ship (1999)
Sources
← Realm of the Elderlings dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.