The Last Wish

A truly enchanting book full of wit and charisma

As with the games (where I learnt of the Witches) these stories have an incredible amount of detail and intrigue. You can see why the games are so highly regarded when coming from material such as this.

You'll love all the characters, good and bad. You'll love the witty humour and how quickly it can get dark. You'll love the clever monsters and myths. Its truly a book that any fan of fantasy should read. And being so short but filled with so many stories, it truly feels like I've lived Geralt's stories with him. A truly rare phenomenon is this series and I am thoroughly looking forward to reading a the sequels.

Pro beastie hunter
too sassy to hang around
get paid and get out.

For the Read Harder Challenge “a genre book in translation.” Genre: fantasy. Original language: Polish. Done and done.

Such a fantastic book! 4.5 stars!

I've been a big fan of the Witcher game series for a long long time, its taken me a lot longer than it should have to start reading the books but i'm really glad I've finally started.
Anyone who's played the games will be familiar with the set up of the books, we follow Geralt of Rivia as he hunts monsters and takes on quests, the book and games have a similar layout in the sense of there is one story (the main story) that we dip in and out of with multiple smaller stories (side quests) breaking up the main story, I really enjoyed this style as it kept the story fresh.

Some of the series key characters are introduced during The Last Wish and its great to see characters I love from the games being so well written, the story of how Geralt becomes good friends with Dandelion the poet and also how Geralt and Yen (Yennifer) meet are done especially well, the introduction to Yen really had me hooked and I cant wait to read more to see there relationship grow.

Now, I wont lie, in the games I always lean towards Triss over Yen so I would have liked to see Triss in book one, she was mentioned but didn't make an appearance, this inst a negative but she's a great character so I hope she makes an appearance in book #2.

For people who are not aware of the Witcher, a Witcher is someone who is trained and mutated as a child to hunt monsters and protect innocent people, as times change and the world evolves there are less Witchers and the remaining Witchers are treated as outcasts by most, however, when something goes wrong or there are monsters in your town Geralt is the man.

I would highly recommend this series to anyone interested in Fantasy, the world is well built the characters are memorable and very likeable and the focus on Polish folklore is really interesting bringing in monsters we dont see often. MUST READ!

Tip - If you dont know the Witcher, look at a trailer for the Witcher 3 Wild Hunt before reading the book, this will help give you an idea of the world and introduce you to some of the amazing characters!

Definitely worth reading if you're a fan of the games. Felt a bit biased towards liking it since I already know the characters, might not have enjoyed it as much otherwise.

Il guardiano degli innocenti, in originale “Ostatnie życzenie”, è una raccolta di racconti fantasy scritta dallo scrittore polacco Andrzej Sapkowski. La prima edizione polacca è stata pubblicata nel 1993, quella inglese nel 2007 e quella italiana nel 2010. Il libro è stato tradotto in diverse altre lingue con una particolarità: l'autore ha sempre preteso che la traduzione venisse fatta direttamente dal polacco alla lingua di destinazione, senza l'intermediazione dell'inglese, per non perdere le particolarità e le sfumature della sua scrittura.

Il libro fa parte della saga “Geralt di Rivia”, di cui il protagonista è uno strigo (“wiedźmin” in polacco, “witcher” in inglese e nei videogiochi in italiano) chiamato anche Gwynbleidd (Lupo Bianco) nella lingua antica delle Driadi e soprannominato “Il Macellaio di Blaviken”; dalla celebre serie di libri di cui è protagonista sono stati tratti inoltre diversi media, tra i quali un film, una serie televisiva e una trilogia videoludica sviluppata da CD Projekt RED, quest'ultima di successo internazionale.

Uno strigo è un umano mutato tramite il cosiddetto “Rito delle Erbe” che gli ha conferito, oltre a poteri magici basilari, una rapidità superiore a quella umana e dei sensi molto sviluppati. Gli strighi sono specializzati nell'uccisione di mostri e nello spezzare incantesimi. Girano il mondo mettendo in vendita la loro abilità al miglior offerente, ma devono rimanere neutrali in qualunque questione che non riguardi i mostri. Nella sua professione si avvale spesso delle sue svariate abilità. Geralt è inoltre un probo spadaccino, anche senza tener conto dei suoi mutamenti.

Geralt è un uomo dalla personalità complessa: agli strighi vengono estirpate la maggior parte delle emozioni, quindi il suo carattere è essenzialmente cinico e stoico. Molto raramente fa trapelare emozioni ed è spesso restio ad integrarsi in una società. Ciononostante, Geralt riesce a stringere poche ma solide amicizie e talvolta persino relazioni amorose, benché travagliate.

Geralt appare come un uomo alto e snello, di età indecifrabile. Gli occhi sono gialli e simili a quelli di un felino. Come risultato dell'essere stato sottoposto ad esperimenti più intensi e complicati dei suoi colleghi strighi, i suoi lunghi capelli sono bianchi, così come la sua barba, fattore che conferisce a Geralt l'epiteto di “Lupo Bianco”.

Il libro è un'antologia di sette racconti di cui uno, “La voce della ragione”, funge da cornice narrativa. È inoltre il primo libro in termini di cronologia (ma il secondo in termini di pubblicazione) della Saga di Geralt di Rivia. I racconti qui contenuti sono i seguenti:

La voce della ragione
Lo strigo
Un briciolo di verità
Il male minore
Una questione di prezzo
Il confine del mondo
L'ultimo desiderio

Sicuramente uno dei libri fantasy che più mi ha appassionato negli ultimi anni, un ottimo prologo che invoglia a proseguire la lettura all'interno della saga, la scrittura dell'autore è semplice, diretta, veloce ma descrittiva che non annoia mai: quello che ci vuole all'interno di un buon racconto dove si hanno poche pagine per sviluppare una storia.

Tutti i racconti sono l'occasione per descriverci ed introdurci nel mondo, nei personaggi, ed il contesto dove questi si muovono e per parlarci del protagonista principale e dei comprimari (anche questi molto ben costruiti); eppure si percepisce che niente è abbozzato, tutto lascia presagire di un mondo solido, reale anche se immaginario, con problemi razziali, conflitti politici, storie su avvenimenti passati di maghi, uomini e strighi che disegnano un contesto oscuro e brutale ma vivido, interessante e assolutamente coinvolgente.

Mi è piaciuta molto la costruzione di Geralt, un paria con una missione (quella di uccidere mostri dietro un giusto compenso), che non prova sentimenti, incapace di amare (ma solo in apparenza), vagabondo nel mondo, ripudiato dai più e amato da pochissimi, fedele ad un suo codice personale che non infrange mai. Potrebbe sembrare, scritto così, un cavaliere senza macchia di un qualsiasi stereotipo di fantasy, ma l'autore gli ha donato molte sfaccettature che sono sicuro usciranno in maniera prepotente nei prossimi volumi.

Consiglio la lettura a tutti gli amanti del fantasy alla ricerca di nuove idee e nuovi personaggi, che escono e di discostano dai soliti canoni del genere.

The only thing I knew going into this book was that it formed the basis of the hugely popular Witcher video games. As someone whose gaming days peaked in the era of PS1, I was basically going into this book blind.

I have to say, this was a bit of a mixed bag for me.

The Good:

The prose, the world, and the dark twists on classic fairy tales were all spectacular. The English translation is excellent, and I would never have suspected the book was originally written in another language. Geralt and the whole concept of Witchers are both fascinating.

For those of you who enjoy audiobooks, Peter Kenny's narration is incredible.

The Bad:

One thing that often prevents me from enjoying fairy tale retellings is that they feel like a story you're hearing secondhand. All the plot points are there, the atmosphere is intriguing, but it's hard to actually feel like you can connect with the characters.

Unfortunately, The Last Wish has the same issue. I can count on one hand (with fingers to spare) the number of times we get to peek inside Geralt's head and see what he's thinking. If I were to pick a page at random and read an excerpt, I wouldn't have been able to tell that Geralt was the point-of-view character.

As someone who reads primarily for the characters, this made it hard for me to feel invested in the story.

Overall:

I'm glad I read the book, but I won't be continuing the series. From what I've heard, this is one of the best Witcher books, and it just didn't interest me enough to continue.

I am not the biggest fan of short stories. I didn't even know this was an anthology until I started reading it. That being said, I LOVED this book!! I love Geralt, and Dandelion. I bought the rest of the series.

Originally played the Witcher 3 and found myself quickly obsessed with the story. I just knew I had to pick this series up and discover the world of Geralt. Despite knowing the end to a lot of threads in this books, I think it improved the reading experience as I was able to pick up on little details and appreciate what they meant, or would later mean. Something that be amiss on a blind reading. Despite spoilers the book remains very solid.

Turning tropes on their head, love the unique takes on standard fairy tales. Good start to the series.

hard to follow sometimes as the text is intentionally withholding at points, but still really enjoyable, especially after having played the witcher games

I found out about this book through The Witcher games. The universe is incredibly reach and each of the short stories in this book adds another layer to the world. The story of a monster hunter that travels the world is incredibly interesting.

If you've got a monster, if no one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire...the Witcher!

This was a very enjoyable series of short fantasy stories, held together by a bridging story. Each story follows Geralt as he arrives in a new locality and invariably is presented with a problem which he solves with great cunning. In this it strongly reminds me of a good many, enjoyable, 80s TV series.

I enjoyed this book on several levels. Firstly, Geralt slowly reveals himself to be a very likable character. He clearly views himself as a bit of a jaded mercenary, but it becomes clear that he has a very warm heart. Secondly, each story has an interesting twist on a traditional tale, spotting the story and watching the very interesting twists was great fun. Lastly I've got to say the final story was just an excellent bit of world building and a darn good adventure story. It felt a bit like a fantasy version of the A-Team mixed with Ghostbusters.

Fun stuff!

PS. Oh yes, there may be a computer game or three based on this book too.

These short stories were great!

Executive Summary: I haven't played any of the Witcher games, though I've been vaguely aware of them for awhile. I thought this book was decent, but it didn't make me want to rush out to play the games or pick up the next book.

Full Review
This book is really a collection of 6 short stories tied together with several interludes. I probably liked some of the interludes better than any one story. I was more interested in the Witcher and the politics of his world than I was about any of the random monsters he fought in stories themselves.

Geralt seems like an interesting character whose a bit of an anti-hero, or maybe simply someone who has their own code and sticks to it. He's essentially a mercenary for hire, but he'll only take jobs that he agrees with. I'd like to know more about Witchers and their place in the world, as they seem to be going out of fashion as magic dies out in the world.

My rating is simply an average of the 6 stories plus the interludes. It's a 3.5, rounded down because the format didn't work well for me. I'd have preferred a single story with more depth I guess. Maybe the next book (or the games) will give me that. I may check it out eventually.

The Witcher - 3.5 stars.
A Grain of Truth - 3 stars
The Lesser Evil - 3.5 stars.
A Question of Price - 3.5 stars
The Edge Of The World - 3.5 stars
The Last Wish - 3.5 stars
Interludes (Voice of Reason) - 4 stars

Geralt of Rivia is an intriguing character. I liked this collection of short stories with a framing thread. I guess this means I have to buy more books!

Geralt is a Witcher, taken as a child and raised to kill all sorts of monsters and sometimes he even gets paid for it.

Not all of his missions are clear cut good vs evil. Sometimes what seems to be evil is not and what is good is actually evil.

This book spawned a series of successful console games. That I now want to play after reading this.

I actually listened to it on audio and it was performed very well.

While this book isn't destined to be one of my favorites, I read it at the exact right time to enjoy it. I just started playing D&D again, and the characters in this book put me exactly in that RPG campaign space. This book functions as an anthology introduction to the Witcher universe. It is a series of self-contained tales within a frame introducing many of the characters that later appear in the series (and the video games which you do not need to play to enjoy the books. The novels came first and the author has said he holds them far over the games in terms of canon). The stories draw a lot from fairy tales and Slavic mythology, making them both familiar and original. The characters are not terrifically interesting or unique, but are fun representations of RPG archetypes. I might enjoy a novel-length treatment of the characters more, but this was an enjoyable series of adventures to get me back in that D&D headspace.

A huge nostalgia trip. I used to read the Wither books when I was in high school and I absolutely loved them. After many years I decided to give the English version a try. And I didn't like it at all.

So I left the rest of the series and didn't continue. Recently I found the fan translation in English and since the book isn't very long I decided to give it another go. What a difference! Everything I remembered was there and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It's incredible how big of a difference the translation makes. The fan translation is definitely closer to the original material and I was surprised to find no glaring mistakes or editing errors. It was great and I plan on reading the rest of the series again. I will try switching between the official and fan translations and see how it goes.

Now if only they released a hard-cover collectors edition of the entire saga... oh one can dream!

First of all, I bought this book because of the video game series, one of the most famous E-RPGs ever made. Despite the physical resemblance (and even in some other aspects of his personality) with Elric, Geralt is a very interesting character.

This book is actually a collection of short stories of our witcher friend, culminating in the fateful encounter with the famous (and infamous) sorceress Yennefer. This short story Edge of the World and The Last Wish are, without a doubt, the best. The pace of the narrative is quite amazing and the unfolding of the plot has lots of fun.

Interesting read, although the whole format of shorts reminded me of the Kane Series. I would of like a more in depth store.

Here comes a fantasy written very differently from most of the others. Its more like a collection of stories tied into one long story and surprisingly it works. Each story stands on its own and helps in world building nicely. The background to the Witcher is also interesting and we will likely know more as the story unfolds. If only the main protagonist had been a bit better defined this might have rated higher in my evaluation.

actual vote: 4.5 stars.


Geralt di Rivia sembra essere un personaggio molto interessante, perspicace e pieno di segreti. Il racconto più bello è stato “L'ultimo desiderio” in cui si narra l'incontro tra lo strigo e Yennefer, una potente maga.
L'autore rivisita le fiabe in modo piuttosto originale: lo fa dal punto di vista di Geralt, ne prende alcuni elementi e li applica ai suoi personaggi modificandone gli eventi. a me le rivisitazioni delle favole non mi piacciono per niente, però queste non mi sono dispiaciute.

The first time I heard of The Witcher books, it was through the video games. I had heard that the games had gotten rave reviews, and when I found out that they were based on books (and not the other way around, interestingly enough), I though it would be a good idea to go out and read the originals before I got down to finding myself copies of the game to play. However, I was stopped cold when I found out that the books were, in fact, in Polish, and at the time there was no available translation. If I had known there were fan translations I might have settled for those out of sheer desperate curiosity, but since I didn't know about those either, I was able to wait until copies of the official translation finally surfaced on my side of the world.

As of the moment, there are only two officially translated books available: The Last Wish, which is a collection of short stories, and Blood of Elves, which is the first novel in the series proper. Since the stories in The Last Wish precede the events of Blood of Elves, it was obvious that I ought to begin with the short story collection. And, as far as introductions go, I find The Last Wish to be, in its way, more than adequate.

The Last Wish is, as mentioned earlier, a collection of short stories about the life and times of Geralt of Rivia, the (in)famous witcher after whom the entire series is named. There is one overarching “frame story” titled “The Voice of Reason,” which shows Geralt in the temple of the goddess Melitele, having escaped to it after some very unsavory events, the details for which are scattered throughout the other stories in the book.

The stories alternate between “The Voice of Reason” and the other tales, and in some ways there is an interesting point to this. In the other stories, Geralt is presented as his job describes him: a witcher, and one with a rather unsavory reputation, going about his job as best as he can even if, most of the time, he gets the short end of the stick when it comes to promised rewards, or finds himself manipulated for other purposes than taking out the monsters a witcher is trained to fight. Take, for instance, in the short story “The Witcher,” wherein Geralt combats a striga and breaks a curse along the way, but who gets half his neck chewed off in the process (and is therefore the main reason why he's at the temple in the first place) and no real (monetary) reward for his services. Or “A Question of Price,” where Geralt is forced to choose between a greater or lesser evil, but winds up losing either way.

One of the first things that struck me while reading these stories is that Geralt feels a lot like Hellboy from Mike Mignola's fantastic Hellboy graphic novels - well, mostly in that both Geralt and Hellboy share a dry sense of humor and are outsiders who have much more in common with the things they fight than humanity at large. The difference, though, is that everybody loves Hellboy, whereas, in The Last Wish, almost everybody hates Geralt. Nowhere is this made clearer than in A Question of Price, where Geralt loses a friend at the very end of the story - not to death, but to the fact that this friend has seen the darker side of what Geralt does, and because he cannot take it decides to end whatever friendship they have.

Another thing that struck me about these stories is how often they reference familiar fairytales. The story titled “A Grain of Truth,” for instance, is essentially a re-imagining of the Beauty and the Beast fairytale to fit into The Witcher universe. And it's not the only one: "The Witcher" references Snow White. "A Question of Price" is a nod to the story of Gawain and his wife from Arthurian legend. "The Last Wish" has a genie at the center of the story. And "The Lesser Evil" references almost every other fairytale the other stories missed, from Rapunzel to The Princess and the Frog to Rumpelstiltskin. There is, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with all these references and re-imaginings - in fact, they are ridiculously fun. It only makes me raise my eyebrow slightly in that there seemed to be so much borrowing done that it made me wonder if The Witcher universe had any “original” lore of its own.

As for Geralt himself, I find him quite interesting. He rather reminds me of a vigilante gunman from an old Western, who goes from town to town delivering justice and doing the jobs only he can do (and a few he gets roped into against his will), but in the end, being chased out of town because nobody wants him to stay around for very long because of his reputation. He has very, very few friend, and loses a few more every once in a while, but those who have stuck around are, for the most part, wonderful people - like Nenneke, the head priestess of the temple of Melitele, who shelters and heals Geralt throughout the story arc of “The Voice of Reason,” or Dandilion (and yes, that is how his name is spelled), the bard who got into a whole lot of trouble with Geralt during the events of “The Edge of the World” and “The Last Wish” and who still considers Geralt a friend despite those events. And then there is the mysterious Yennefer, introduced in “The Last Wish” and whose hold on Geralt is greater than anyone truly comprehends. All of them are fascinating, to a one, and will hopefully put in appearances of their own in Blood of Elves - because truly, if Geralt doesn't miss them, I think I will.

Overall, The Last Wish is an excellent lead-in to The Witcher universe. By settling into the world via short stories, not a novel, the reader is not pressured to quickly absorb everything about this world, as would normally be the case with a full-length novel. It also appears to have put less pressure on Sapkowski's shoulders, as well, since each story develops in its own way while showcasing various facets of Geralt, his friends, his enemies, and his world. As for the individual stories themselves, they are largely enjoyable to read, though the sheer amount of fairytale references may have some readers raising their eyebrows on occasion. Otherwise, though, this is an enjoyable read, and will allow the reader to decide whether or not he or she actually likes The Witcher universe enough before committing to the novel. For my part, I like it enough to commit, and I will be getting to it as soon as I acquire a copy of Blood of Elves.

It's not very often that I finish a book inside a week. However The Last Wish kept me hooked from start to finish. I'm sure a lot of that has got to do with the fact that the book is split into small, bit sized stories that make it perfect for those who enjoy reading before bed.