Took me eleven weeks and I'm not sorry.

Context, because it matters: I moved flat in February and the removals lad made a comment about the number of boxes marked BOOKS. There were nine. Nine is fine. Nine is not fine, I know it isn't, please don't tell my mother. Oathbringer travelled in box four and then lived on the arm of the sofa until the end of March, because it is a brick and my wrists are, frankly, not what they were.

Anyway. The eleven weeks weren't really about the length. I kept having to put it down and walk around the flat. Dalinar's flashbacks did for me. I knew roughly what was coming, because everyone in that fandom has been winking about it for years, and it still landed like a dropped plate on a tiled floor. There's a moment near the end where he says the thing and I said "oh no" out loud in a Pret, and a woman two tables over looked at me with real concern.

It isn't all glorious — the middle is a swamp. Shallan's whole business in there went on for about a month of my actual life, and I'd read four pages and realise I'd spent them thinking about whether the shelf over the radiator is bowing (it is bowing, it has been bowing since 2023, I have decided this is fine). Some of the jokes are Dad Humour of the purest kind. And there's an amount of setting-up-for-later that feels a bit cheeky when you're 1,200 pages deep and there are five more of these things coming.

But Bridge Four? Perfect. I would die for all of them and twice over for Rock. There's also a chapter from a character I'd written off completely in the last book, which sent me back to reread her earlier sections wearing the guilty face of a person who has been unfair to someone who isn't real.

The thing nobody warned me about: so much of it is people being ill and carrying on anyway. I read most of it in a bad February and a worse March and it was oddly practical company; it takes the position that you get up again, without ever pretending that getting up is easy or that it works every time. I don't want to make it sound like one of those books with a subtitle. It absolutely isn't. But it was the right brick at the right moment.

Eight rather than nine because of the sag, and because I took a fortnight off in the middle to read something short and came back having forgotten half the names, which is my fault and also slightly the book's fault for having eleven of everything.

If you're going in fresh: don't start this in a month when you're moving house. Book four is on the shelf above the telly where I can see it. I'm working up to it...