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Written in Fire (The Brilliance Trilogy) Paperback – January 12, 2016
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For thirty years humanity struggled to cope with the brilliants, the one percent of people born with remarkable gifts. For thirty years we tried to avoid a devastating civil war. We failed.
The White House is a smoking ruin. Madison Square Garden is an internment camp. In Wyoming, an armed militia of thousands marches toward a final, apocalyptic battle.
Nick Cooper has spent his life fighting for his children and his country. Now, as the world staggers on the edge of ruin, he must risk everything he loves to face his oldest enemy—a brilliant terrorist so driven by his ideals that he will sacrifice humanity’s future to achieve them.
From “one of our best storytellers” (Michael Connelly) comes the blistering conclusion to the acclaimed series that is a “forget-to-pick-up-milk, forget-to-water-the-plants, forget-to-eat total immersion experience” (Gillian Flynn).
The explosive conclusion to the bestselling Brilliance Trilogy.
“The kind of story you’ve never read before.” —Lee Child, New York Times bestselling author of the Jack Reacher Series
“Ridiculously good. I love this story so much.” —Gillian Flynn, New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl
“Sakey brings his cinematic series to a ferocious close.” —Kirkus
- Print length345 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJanuary 12, 2016
- Dimensions5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-101477827641
- ISBN-13978-1477827642
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Beginning with Brilliance and A Better World, and culminating in the pitch-perfect trilogy-finisher, Written in Fire, Marcus Sakey has created an astonishing achievement—a portrait of our world five minutes into the future. It’s a world exploding with technology and innovation, but imploding with the same fear and paranoia that threatens to destroy our world: fear of those who are different. What message could be more profound? These books are all thriller, with a perfect dusting of science fiction and social commentary, all underpinned with Sakey’s trademark gorgeous prose. For my money, this trilogy is one of the great works of commercial fiction ever put to page. Epic, compulsively readable, and thought-provoking to the very last sentence.” —Blake Crouch, bestselling author of the Wayward Pines Series
“The searing conclusion to Sakey’s Brilliance trilogy...raises important questions about such matters as patriotism, self-sacrifice, conflicting loyalties, and parental devotion.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Sakey brings his cinematic series to a ferocious close, capping off a three-book experiment in futuristic violence, societal catastrophe, and hyperkinetic storytelling…A bombastic final entry that combines larger-than-life futurism with convincing ultraviolence to deliver a satisfying, open-ended finale.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Sakey can flat-out write.” —Don Winslow
“Sakey transcends the spoon-fed dystopia of young adult epics such as The Hunger Games with thoughtful allusions to such contemporary issues as the mistreatment of minorities, global warming, government corruption and genetic engineering—and just the right undercurrent of satire.” —Chicago Tribune
“Written in Fire is so wildly imaginative in evoking its own new world order that I feel like those lucky few critics who received advance copies of The Lord of the Rings back in the 1950s. Terrifying in its treatment and relentless in exploring the dark underbelly of society, this is reading entertainment that borders on the classic.” —Providence Journal
“Sakey proves himself as a master, once again. This time taking his skills as a mystery writer and weaving them together with themes of evolution and societal tension, creating something all together unique and impossible to put down. When the battle is done, Sakey leaves you satisfied, but still wanting more in the world of the Brilliance trilogy. If that’s not the sign of a perfect trio of books, I don’t know what is.” —Crimespree Magazine
“One of the most satisfying conclusions to a thriller that I’ve read in quite some time.” —Toledo Blade
“With the three volumes comprising his outstanding series The Brilliance Trilogy, author Marcus Sakey has established himself as a gifted and original storyteller, and a truly exceptionally action/adventure novelist.” —Midwest Book Review
Praise for Marcus Sakey’s The Brilliance Trilogy
“At once mystery, thriller, family saga, and romance...The plot takes many unpredictable twists, the characters are multidimensional, the world quite believable and the social/political commentary pointed and often chilling.” —Chicago Tribune
“A decidedly adult, disturbingly feasible spin to the dystopian future trend overtaking literature.” —Chicago Sun-Times
“An astoundingly good writer.” —San Jose Mercury News
“It's depth and intelligence and passion and emotion that sets Sakey apart.” —Lee Child
“A tightly plotted thriller with classic questions beating in its geeky heart.” —NPR
An Amazon.com Best Books of the Month: Science Fiction & Fantasy Pick
“Sakey paints a near future too close for comfort.” —Publishers Weekly
“Utterly compelling.” —Booklist, Starred Review
“Brilliant.” —Chicago Sun-Times
About the Author
Marcus Sakey’s thrillers have been nominated for more than fifteen awards. They’ve been named New York Times Editors’ Choice picks and have been selected among Esquire’s top five books of the year. His novel Good People was made into a movie starring James Franco and Kate Hudson, and Brilliance is currently in development with Legendary Pictures.
Sakey lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter.
For more information, visit www.MarcusSakey.com.
Product details
- Publisher : Thomas & Mercer (January 12, 2016)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 345 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1477827641
- ISBN-13 : 978-1477827642
- Item Weight : 11.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,110,233 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,849 in Terrorism Thrillers (Books)
- #5,215 in Espionage Thrillers (Books)
- #6,603 in Dystopian Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Marcus Sakey’s books have sold more than a million copies and been translated into dozens of languages. He lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter. For more information, visit MarcusSakey.com and follow him here, on Facebook (Facebook.com/MarcusSakey), and on Twitter (twitter.com/MarcusSakey).
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For the uninitiated the Brilliance trilogy is focused on the appearance of a group of people known as the abnorms or brilliants. Starting in the year 1980, one percent of the world are born with amazing, savant like gifts, ways of thinking, organizing information, cataloging of data, reacting differently to surrounding stimuli etc. They were not born with Xmen like powers, i.e, no one is shooting optic blasts out of their eyes or manipulating magnetism, but the most powerful Brilliants possess the ability to quickly sense patterns in the stock market, thereby crashing the market, or being the tactical equivalent of Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great combined. Others have the ability to recognize body language in others, allowing them to discern hidden motives and intentions of other people. While, others are able to identify vectors in a crowd, effectively shifting to where people are not paying attention, thereby remaining invisible. Some are born just flat out geniuses, able to create new technology, see programing code as if it were a simple song etc. Even though the population of Brilliants is small, only about 1% of the population of the world, they are a seen as a threat to the rest of us, the normal, people born without their great gifts. As a result, and as with any minority group they are both persecuted and loved for their gifts while also immensely feared, and on both sides Brilliant and normal there are voices pushing for War, a way to remake the world order with one group permanently dominating the other.
At the onset of Written In Fire, the first salvos of the War have already been fired. The White House is a smoking ruin, destroyed by a commandeered missile launched from a US submarine by the Brilliants from their sanctuary in Wyoming. Thousands of American troops laying siege to the Brilliant’s sanctuary have also been slaughtered when the Brilliants turned their own weapons against them. (Unbeknownst to the public these attacks where in self-defense after the Defense Secretary ordered the soldiers surrounding the Brilliants Sanctuary to attack.) Madison Square Garden is a concentration camp, riots are breaking out all over the country, the Speaker of the House is the new president, and food shortages and fear are gripping the country. Brilliants the country over are being blamed for the deaths of the soldiers and the attempted decapitation of the Government, lynchings, beatings etc are now common place. To make matters worse, a rightwing militia bent on revenge is now marching on the Brilliants sanctuary in Wyoming seeking to wipe every Brilliant , man ,woman and child off the map. Yes, this world stinks. All the while there is one hope, as a genius scientist has discovered how to make normal people Brilliants, and a race ensues to find this man before his research can be co-opted for nefarious ends.
Whew! The board has been set for a great novel and this one does not disappoint. However great the plot, what drives this novel forward is the well written characters. The author does a great job writing believable and real characters, ones that we all can relate to. We intimately know the motivations of all the main characters, their fears, their wishes and what drives each of them. The heroes in the novel are expertly described, their motivations and desires laid bare for the reader to understand and relate to. For instance, driving the main character Nick Cooper, is the desire to protect his family, every action stems from this, it drives every morally ambiguous decision he makes yet as a father it is a decision I could certainly relate to. Cooper also serves as the moral center of the novel, twisted as that may be, revealing to both sides, Brilliant and Human, that sanitized decisions made at the highest levels of power have real impact on the lives of the people the powerful are trying to protect. Torn between both worlds, all Cooper wants is peace and he will fight to the death trying to avert a war that seems all but inevitable.
However, heroes aside, the highlight of the novel are the villains of which there are many. The villains are multi-faceted each with come with competing yet understandable agendas. The author takes the time to paint a great picture on each of them detailing what motivates their goals, and why they all think the way they do. As with the heroes of the novel, you know exactly what drives the villains and I could easily see their points of view if I placed myself in their shoes. At the onset of the novel, I thought for instance that I was going to hate the leaders of the Right Wing militia leading the charge against the New Canaan Holdfast, the sanctuary of the Brilliants, but I remembered 9/11. I remembered the rage I felt that day when the Twin Towers were hit, the thirst for revenge at times clouding basic reason. Placing myself in that frame of mind, I imagined a world where in a single day the White House was destroyed, the president and many of the cabinet killed, a world where the Stock Exchange was bombed a few weeks before, a couple of American cities lay under siege by Brilliant Terrorists, and to top it all off, I lost both my sons in the Desert of Wyoming to a sneak attack. Putting myself in their shoes, I felt these people, though still deranged, their pain and what drove them. I may not have liked them or even wanted them to win, but I understood them. This was a nice touch.
Even the uber-Villain John Smith, comes across as less a nihilist terrorist but more of a deranged visionary, a man who believes that given human nature the prospects for peace are small, with society’s institutions to corrupt and ingrained to embrace the change needed to instill and maintain peace. In his mind perhaps it is just better to burn the whole thing down and start all over. Crazy, but given John’s background the atrocities committed against his people and what he went through, I understood once again where he was coming from. All of the major characters are written like this, you as a reader know what drives them and why, you know their innermost fears, their wants and desires and this makes for a fulfilling book. The characters are not just plot devices but living breathing people. Great job.
Sakey also does a great job showcasing the downsides of Brilliance, none moreso than the character of Soren, a character who experiences eleven seconds for every one second of our own. Soren more than anything embodies the tragic character of the novel, a person so cut off and isolated from the beauty that arises from simple human interaction such as simple communication and art that it has made him effectively a monster. Imagine living life never able to comprehend music or even simple communication with your neighbor as their every word or musical note are mashed together in incomprehensible gibberish. On the flip side, we have Millie a reader of amazing power. Imagine that you are able to read the thoughts and intentions of the people around you, but you can’t turn off the power. As such, you are always bombarded with the thoughts and intentions of those around you, inundating you with their wants and desires, always in danger of supplanting your own. Imagine how isolating both of these abilities would be, a point brought home powerfully in the novel.
As I mentioned earlier, the Trilogy in my opinion is a thinly veiled allegory about society, and the ability of civilization to turn in on itself and eat its own rather than come together. In the novel we see the brilliants effectively serving as the “other”, a strictly powerful “other”, but an “other” nonetheless. Substitute any persecuted group, in today’s political discussion and you can see how Sakey subtly weaves in the themes of alienation, tribalism, group identification and the human tendency to fear the unknown. Fearing persecution it is only natural for an oppressed or minority group to seek refuge among them, i.e form a minority enclave, which we see happens in the novel, but this enclave ironically only fosters more suspicion and mistrust among the majority. Taking these disparate themes and running with him, Sakey shows that unless we overcome our fear and mistrust of those different than ourselves, we are effectively bringing to past the very future we all claim that we are trying to avoid. We are in a sense rushing towards the abyss with the best of intentions at heart. The fault lines in his fictional society are laid bare and the very idea of community, what it means to be a nation or a country are vividly at stake. Sakey also shows how radical or the loudest voices on both sides of a discussion inevitably drive conflict whereas the voice in the middle, the silent voice in the middle is asking for peace and simply to raise their children in safety. Sprinkling in a little commentary of foreign policy by proxy, Sakey also shows how third party allies inevitably have different goals than their sponsor, a potent lesson for contemporary foreign policy makers the world over. All in all, the themes in this series and book are applicable to our world today in a real and viable way.
If I had to fault this book, I would have to say that the ending of the novel and the final cessation of conflict comes across as simply too easy. I won’t spoil it, but I’m not sure that a moment of appealing to the better angels of our nature would have worked as effectively as the novel portends. Possibly, but I am more cynical of human nature. Likewise, the budding love triangle in the novel is tidied up a little to nicely, but it does work. The epilogue though powerful is a little too open ended for my taste. I would have preferred more closure, but that is just me.
All in all, Written in Fire is an amazing book and a fitting conclusion to the Brilliance Trilogy. I cannot praise this book highly enough and I give it my most enthusiastic recommendation. This trilogy has cemented itself among my favorite trilogies of all time. Thanks for creating and sharing this world with all of us Mr. Sakey, books and series like this are why I love to read.
I really loved the first book of this trilogy. It was amazing. It was everything we want about pseudo-superpowers and it was told so realistically and down to earth. I love the conflict between the normal ppl and the emerging superclass of brilliants. And I was immediately biased in favor of John Smith. I mean, the government basically raised him and his ppl in concentration camps, so he has every reason to unleash hell on them as soon as he gets the chance. Also he's like the smartest dude ever and outsmarts/outthinks everybody. He's the best.
In this book the author continues to write with a good mix of action, plot development, and suspense/fear of how the war between Norms and brilliants is going to explode. I mean ***SPOILER*** the second book ended w/ the brilliants blowing up the damn White House so the scene was already set for a cool ass story to unfold in this book. Honestly I just loved this trilogy a lot.
I just realized, SPOILERS from here on out
However, this is the real ***SPOILER*** territory. I was sssooooo pissed w/ how the author chose to end the series. In the second book Nick Cooper beat Soren (who is the best, I mean perceiving life in super slow motion? Sick as hell. And he finds peace by getting lost in the moment. He fights w/ no tells/indications/tendencies, just blank face murder... I could go on and on, he's the best), and the fact that Nick beat him in the 2nd book by hiding like b**** was weak. In the 3rd book Nick and his crew find a clever way to "torture" Soren so that Soren snitches on John Smith's plan. This helps Nick Cooper find John Smith's hideout and shut down the entire plan.
So I'm gonna call bulls*** on that cuz John Smith knew Nick had captured Soren and he knew of the one thing (person) they could use to get Soren to snitch. John Smith would have planned around it, not get busted at his own hideout like a rookie. Also John Smith had a chance to kill Shannon and in reality he would have done it, it was bulls*** how she convinced him out of it.
So at the end Soren and Nick have a final fight, and this time Soren completely whoops Nick's ass (as he should) cuz there's no tricks and no bulls*** this time. But then at the last second Soren gets distracted for a bulls*** reason and Nick kills him. Complete bulls***. Then in the epilogue the author reveals that John Smith's back up plan actually kinda worked and insinuates that eventually John Smith's back up plan will succeed and change the world as intended. This was a complete cop out, I am so ashamed of you Marcus Sakey. You know that John Smith was better and that he would have outsmarted Nick and that was so wrong of you to give such a weak consolation prize to ppl who sided w/ John Smith. If you wanted John Smith to win then you should have stated the aftermath of his plan more explicitly, if Nick was meant to win then his victory should have been complete and unadulterated. Complete cop out.
The other thing I realized is that the author complete loves the main character Nick Cooper, that's the only reason Nick always came out on top no matter what, even when he wasn't skilled enough to do so. Also it was complete bulls*** cuz Nick Cooper didn't lose anything (except his former coworkers at the Brilliants hunting agency died in a bombing, but that's nothing). Nick's ex-wife survived, his kids survived, and Shannon survived. Both his ex-wife and Shannon should have died in the events of the war. That's such bulls*** that Nick got everything he wanted. HE DIDN'T EVEN HAVE TO TELL HIS EX-WIFE THAT HE WAS LEAVING HER FOR SHANNON! The author even gave him the easy way out w/ that! Seriously Everything always worked out in Nick's favor and it was so disgusting.
I also don't like Nick cuz he was a complete traitor and didn't realize which side he was supposed to be on. He should have fought for the brilliants. He himself was a brilliant. He learned how evil the government was as they held young brilliants prisoner in concentration camps. In fact his own daughter was meant to be sent to the concentration camp! And the government attacked the brilliants first, everything that followed was just self-defense. Nick you failed, you picked the wrong side and betrayed your own ppl all to protect your evil ass, prejudiced ass, concentration camp ass government.
Lastly, SPOILER, that was bulls*** how the amateur militia captured the abnorm kids that were being housed at the edge of the city. Wouldn't Erik Epstein have been smart enough to realize that since war is coming we need to bring those kids into the center of the city and not leave them at the edges to get captured or killed?
I loved the trilogy but I loved the character John Smith more. The ending was a cop out, but overall this was an excellent series. I'm sad that it's over. John Smith is the best, his plan works and eventually/hopefully the plan will kill off the ppl Nick was trying to protect. Soren is so f'ing cool. So disrespectful how John Smith and Soren die. I just wish I could see the look on Nick's face when he realizes that John Smith still won.
Top reviews from other countries
A couple of interesting twist keep you guessing, as a good story should
The crowd populating the work is credible in the context rendering them all the more appealing
The main protagonists seem innately gifted to wiggle out of sticky wickets
and find a way down the creek all without a paddle!
All in all an engaging trilogy