The Mirror of Her Dreams
core novel 1986 Mordant's Need
Record
| First published | 1986 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.93 (14,158 ratings, collected 2026-10-07) |
| Page count | 642 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780345332981 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
Terisa Morgan, the daughter of rich but neglectful parents, lives alone in a New York apartment and has grown to doubt her own existence; she fills her rooms with mirrors so as to see her reflection and be reassured, moment by moment, that she is there. One night a young man named Geraden comes crashing through one of them. He is an apprentice Imager from Mordant, a kingdom where mirrors are magic, each one a window and a doorway onto some other place, and he has been sent to find the champion who will save his land from an enemy flooding it with monsters translated out of the glass. Instead of a champion, his mirror has found Terisa. In Mordant she is plunged into the intrigues of the castle of Orison, a king who has withdrawn from ruling, his mad Imager Havelock, and a court in which nothing is what it seems.
Where it sits
- Universe: Mordant's Need
- Series: Mordant's Need core; position 1 of 2 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Stephen R. Donaldson
Notes
- From the series record (Mordant's Need): Stephen R. Donaldson's two-volume novel of Terisa Morgan, a New York woman who doubts her own existence, drawn through one of her mirrors into Mordant, a medieval kingdom where Imagery, a magic of mirrors, is the weapon of politics and war. Donaldson has cited Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast as its model.
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 Mordant's Need: position 1 of 2: next A Man Rides Through (1987)
Sources
← Mordant's Need dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.