The rays · onward
The Books
Thirty-two of them, and one obvious place to begin. Every description here leaves the ending standing, because the list is here to send you to the books, not to stand in for them.
The only question that matters
Where to start
Start with Wizard’s First Rule — the 1994 novel, the first one published, exactly where he started.
Wizard’s First Rule (1994)
It was written to be somebody’s first book and it still works as one. There is no glossary to learn first and no map you have to memorize. A forest guide finds a woman being hunted through his woods, and the world opens up at the speed he discovers it.
It also stands on its own. If you read it and stop, you have read a complete novel with an ending. If you keep going, you will find that almost everything in it was load-bearing.
Then what
Read the eleven Sword of Truth novels in publication order, which is also their internal order. Then, if you want more, take the prequels — they are far better as returns than as introductions, because The First Confessor is quietly full of things that only mean anything after you know what Confessors cost.
Read Faith of the Fallen slowly when you reach it. It is the sixth book and the center of gravity of the whole series — where a man in a gray city picks up a chisel, and where the sentence at the top of this page stops being a line and becomes a plot.
Eleven novels, 1994–2007
The Sword of Truth
The spine of everything. Richard, Kahlan, Zedd, and a world divided by walls made of the underworld. One Wizard’s Rule to a book, and the whole book is the working of it.
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1994
Wizard’s First Rule
A woods guide, a Mother Confessor, an odd-looking vine, and a rule about lies. Darken Rahl wants the boxes of Orden. Richard is named Seeker. The series begins in a forest and does not stay there.
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1995
Stone of Tears
Opening the boxes tears the veil. The Sisters of the Light take a war wizard to the Palace of the Prophets, and Kahlan rides toward a Midlands that is already changing. The Second Rule waits in the wreckage of good intentions.
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1996
Blood of the Fold
Zealots who hate magic, mriswith in cloaks that cannot be seen, and Jagang’s shadow spreading out of the Old World. Richard claims D’Hara. The Palace of the Prophets cannot be left standing as a prize.
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1997
Temple of the Winds
A plague, a temple that is also a weapon, and the Fourth Rule — sincere forgiveness, which costs more than a speech about forgiveness. Richard and Kahlan marry in the dust among the Mud People, having earned every word of it.
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1999
Soul of the Fire
The chimes come into the world of the living and magic begins to fail. Anderith talks about peace. Richard watches what people do instead. Dragons, and everything else that needs magic in order to exist, start to die.
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2000
Faith of the Fallen
Nicci takes Richard to the Old World to break him. In Altur’Rang he buys marble and carves a statue, and a city that has been taught it is worthless stands in the dawn and weeps at the sight of it. The Sixth Rule. The center of the whole series.
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2001
The Pillars of Creation
Jennsen and Oba, pristinely ungifted and invisible to magic, hunted by a name they did not choose. A different door into the same war. Life is the future, not the past.
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2003
Naked Empire
Bandakar, a people who have refused violence on principle, and a poison that will not wait for them to finish deciding. Talga Vassternich. Deserve victory.
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2005
Chainfire
Kahlan is missing and the world cannot remember her. Richard’s mind, protected by the Sword, is almost alone with the truth. A contradiction cannot exist in reality — and yet the spell insists.
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2006
Phantom
The hunt continues through a hole in the memory of everyone alive. Turning aside from the truth is treason to one’s self. Jagang still has a use for a woman nobody else can quite see.
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2007
Confessor
The end of the Imperial Order’s war, the unwritten rule, and a choice about what kind of world is worth living in. The blank book Baraccus left is finally understood as something that could never have been copied down.
Around the spine
Twenty-one more
Two prequels underneath the series, four novels continuing it, four that belong to Nicci, five short books about what came knocking afterwards, one that lands far downstream of it all in a world like ours, four crime novels set in Chicago, and one outlier.
Before Richard
The prequels
Both of these are better read after the eleven. They are foundations, and a foundation is far more interesting once you have seen the building.
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2012
The First Confessor: The Legend of Magda Searus
Three thousand years back, in the Great War. Magda Searus, ungifted and newly widowed, walks into the making of the Confessors, the Sword of Truth, and the world Richard will inherit. He self-published it himself, deliberately. This is where the legend begins.
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1998
Debt of Bones
A generation before Richard: how the boundaries were raised, and what a mother was willing to owe a wizard to get her daughter back. First printed in the Legends anthology, later on its own.
2011–2015
Richard and Kahlan
After the war, the story does not stop. A machine under the palace begins speaking in omens, the Dark Lands wake up, and four novels continue both the marriage and the far less romantic work of ruling a world that still has teeth.
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2011
The Omen Machine
Cara’s wedding night, and a device beneath the People’s Palace that will not stay quiet. You can destroy those who speak the truth. You cannot destroy the truth.
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2013
The Third Kingdom
Half people, the Dark Lands, and Bishop Hannis Arc. Richard and Kahlan are pulled straight off the map they thought they had finished with.
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2014
Severed Souls
A stain of death carried in the living, a march on D’Hara, and the reminder that there will always be those who hate.
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2015
Warheart
The last of that arc. In this world everyone must die; the choice is how we wish to live.
2017–2020
The Nicci Chronicles
Nicci leaves the People’s Palace with Nathan and rides into an Old World whose wars were never finished. Ildakar under its shroud, armies of stone, prophecy failing everywhere at once. A Sister of the Dark who chose otherwise, still choosing.
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2017
Death’s Mistress
Nicci and Nathan ride out. Prophecy is failing, and the Phantom Coast turns out not to be empty.
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2018
Shroud of Eternity
Ildakar, frozen inside its own spell — gifted lords, ungifted slaves, and a shroud that has begun to tear.
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2018
Siege of Stone
An army of stone remembers a dead emperor, and the city that hid must decide whether it can live in the open.
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2020
Heart of Black Ice
The last of Nicci’s chronicle, and a war that refuses to stay inside one kingdom.
2019–2020
The Children of D’Hara
Five short books, written to be read as one: Richard and Kahlan after the stars have moved, and a people out of another world who hunt along a bloodline. These were the last things he published.
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2019
The Scribbly Man
A creature that looks drawn in ink and then stood up, a Golden Goddess somewhere behind it, and a palace that is no longer only a palace.
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2019
Hateful Things
The Glee, and what they want from a bloodline.
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2019
Wasteland
After the sky has changed, the ground is not the ground they knew.
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2020
Witch’s Oath
An oath, and the children the world has been waiting for.
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2020
Into Darkness
The last of the Children of D’Hara, and the last of the world of the Keep.
The Scribbly Man, in a corridor of the People’s Palace
The name is Kahlan’s, and so is the description, because she is the woman against the wall and there was nothing else to call it. Picture an artist scribbling the shape of a man in charcoal as fast as he can, no outline and no features, and then picture every one of those scribbles redrawn from nothing each fraction of a second as it comes toward you. Only the claws are solid, three to a hand. Richard asks what color they were, and whether they might have been golden, and she supposes so.
2009 · the far end of Confessor
The same world, much later
This one is shelved as a contemporary thriller and reads like one. It is also set long after the end of Confessor, in a world with the magic gone out of it — the same world, grown old, with the bloodlines still running through it.
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2009
The Law of Nines
Alexander Rahl is a struggling artist in the Midwest, and turning twenty-seven is not merely unwelcome but cataclysmic. He inherits a huge expanse of land he knew nothing about, and his birthday, his name, and the woman whose life he has just saved make him a target. The names are the tell. He is of the Rahl bloodline, and Jax, who says she comes from another world, is an Amnell.
Read the eleven first. This is the far end of them.
2016–2018 · Chicago
Angela Constantine
Four books with no magic in them, sometimes catalogued under Angela Constantine and sometimes under Jack Raynes: two novels with a novella either side of the second. Crime rather than fantasy, and recognizably the same author — people who can see something nobody else can, and who have to decide what to do about it.
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2016
Nest
In the middle of a Chicago murder investigation, Kate Bishop discovers she can identify a killer just by looking into their eyes — and that the ability makes her a target. The first of the four.
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2018
Trouble’s Child
A novella, published ahead of The Girl in the Moon and set in its world.
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2018
The Girl in the Moon
The second novel, and the one the sequence takes its name from. Dean Koontz read it and called it “pure entertainment, a true page-turner, and great fun.”
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2018
Crazy Wanda
A novella, and the fourth and last of the sequence.
2019 · nothing else like it
The outlier
One book belongs to no series, no world and no shelf but its own. It is the last thing on this page and the least like everything above it.
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2019
The Sky People
River is a priestess. The Wolf People have vowed revenge and her own people are facing annihilation, and the only thing that might save them is a myth: she has to prove herself as priestess, and she has to find the Sky People. A novella, and the furthest thing on this shelf from D’Hara.
What they meant to people who read them
Readers
Tor.com posted the news on 17 September 2020. Underneath the notice, readers started leaving comments, and they kept going for days. Nobody asked them to. They are quoted here as they were written, under the names they signed.
My first deployment to Iraq consisted of long hours of boredom and short periods of extreme stress. I finished the only book I packed very quickly… A fellow soldier gave me one of the Sword of Truth books and I devoured it. I ended up reading all of them… He helped me get through some hard times. If I had met him, I would have thanked him for that.
christopher allen
I will never forget the day my dad brought me the first book in my favorite series, Wizard’s First Rule, back in 2000… I wrote him a letter in 2006, asking for advice about my own writing endeavors, and he wrote me a thoughtful two pages. I have that letter hanging on my wall so I can look at it every day I write.
Hilary White
Now, as a librarian, I tell my patrons about The Rule of Terrys. When I have a teen aging into the adult section, or someone who wants more fantasy, I always explain that if a fantasy book has been written by a man named Terry, it is guaranteed to be amazing. Terry Pratchett, Terry Brooks, and Terry Goodkind…
Lucia
He was the first author that I really got intuned with, I never liked reading much growing up, because of my reading disability. A friend of mine let me borrow his copy of Wizards First Rule. I fall in love with the story… Because of Terry books I become a better reader.
Myles Coonrod
His book – stories impact me very deeply on my personal life… Philosophy and fantasy in his books, lead me to my unknown ways. Thank you Mr. Goodkind, I „met“ you through your books. You gave me more than I´m able to tell.
Filip Lansky Zlebek, Czech Republic
My husband and I have read every book in the sword of truth series. Our seven year old daughter’s name is Kahlan after the mother confessor. We tell our kids “think of the solution, not the problem” and so my other simple truths from his books…
Sonja Mayfield
His Sword of Truth series was an essential part of my growth during my teenage and early 20s. The Wizard’s Rules formed a core part of my psyche and personal identity. They have been so ingrained in to my personal beliefs that they influence everything about me.
D. Rogers
I am a 40 year old man from Australia. I have been making my way through the Sword of Truth series for the first time. I love the writing. I love that the novels were written by a man who overcame dyslexia to write them. The stories are vivid and alive.
dandenn
As I read the sad news today, I looked up to where I have “Deserve Victory” written on my office whiteboard as a continual focus. Rest in peace Terry, and thank you – you helped me become a better man.
Jeremy
I may have soured on him a lot when I got older and dug into his themes and beliefs more, but for a time when I was a teenager I LOVED his books. He certainly leaves a… complicated legacy, but still, RIP.
SammyJ9
It was because of Mr Goodkind that I really started reading again… This was when I was in my fifties and really never read this kind of fantasy and I was hooked! I read all 12 books in a year and a half.
Boothy
This man has had a tremendous influence on the lives of millions (myself included), through his works… He rose up and lived his life. May we all do the same in his honor.
Brian Morgan
The end of the site, and the whole of it
Go and read one
Thirty-two books, more than twenty-five million copies, twenty-odd languages, twenty-six years of writing seven days a week. And a better reason to open one than any of those numbers.
What he set out to do was simpler and much harder: to tell stories about people who think, who love, who build things, and who keep their own days as their own. He wrote his first novel at forty-five and saw it published at forty-six, having spent a childhood with dyslexia telling himself stories he could not easily write down, and he kept publishing until the year he died.
So the last word here belongs to him rather than to this site. Open Wizard’s First Rule: six hundred pages of story is the form in which most of us can actually hear it.
Your life is yours alone. Rise up and live it.