Paul Hazel - Finnbranch Trilogy (pdf)

Paul Hazel - The Finnbranch Trilogy (Yearwood, Undersea, Winterking). First published 1980-1985. Now out of print. 222 + 212 + 259 pages.

Good quality clearscan pdf; three separate volumes; new scans based on paperbacks published by Pocket and Bantam in the 80s and early 90s.

This is a beautifully written literary fantasy series that's been unjustly forgotten, though it received high praise when it was published. The author is (or was?) an educator in Connecticut who wrote one more novel (The Wealdwife's Tale) and nothing since.


1. YEARWOOD: "A dark, strikingly original book." - Peter S. Beagle

--cover blurb: "Finn, witchson, bastard, heir to kingdoms on land and undersea, must leave home to seek his true birthright. Through a perilous world of magic he roams ... where crows speak riddles and beautiful witches flash into flame."

2. UNDERSEA: "The reader is accorded glimpses of an enchanted world, a world of shore and sea, not ours, and yet echoing in the mind like something long ago lost and forever missed." - Robin McKinley

--cover blurb: "Bastard son, heir to kingdoms, Finn, once named Herwad, continues his strange and extraordinary quest. After the slaying of his father, High King Ar-Elon, Finn embarks on a bizarre journey to rule again the strange lands beneath the ocean.

3. WINTERKING: "Winterking is like a blessing, a garden of delight. It should be read and reread." - Washington Post

--cover blurb: "Mysterious, enigmatic, youthfully immortal yet eons old, Wyck, now called Wykeham, begins a strange and perilous final quest to fulfill his destiny. Heir to a mysterious age-old will, Wyck leaves New Awanux under great secrecy for his estate in a distant land, bringing with him the eight-legged horse he stole from the world of Undersea. In this new world populated by ancient Druids, talking crows, winged sorcerers, the ghosts of the dearly familiar and the eerily bizarre, Wyck puts into play a mesmerizing, unpredictable chain of events that not even he can control."


description in John Clute's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction:

Primarily a Celtic fantasy about a hero - and underworld god - named Finn, told in a dense, difficult style which nevertheless has very considerable power. The first 2 vols, Yearwood (1980) and Undersea (1982), are moderately orthodox, though recounted with unconventional intensity, but the third, Winterking (1985), is set in an alternate-world version of a contemporary USA riven by the numinous presence of gods and threatened by terminal transformation.

and in John Clute's Encyclopedia of Fantasy:

The Finnbranch sequence presents again and again, in cyclical form, versions of the birth, heroic adulthood and death of a hero named Finn. Though much of the imagery accompanying and intensifying the reiterations of Finn's life-course derives from Celtic fantasy, and inevitably to the Finn Mac Cool cycle, the sequence is in no clear sense obedient to any singly underlying Northern story, Celtic or Arthurian or Teutonic, though elements from these and other cycles appear throughout. Over the course of the first two volumes, which are both set in otherworld-tinged Celtic landscapes, Finn undergoes several of the metamorphoses typical of Celtic fantasy at its most unrelenting. In the third volume, told in the guise of an alternate-world tale set in a displaced 20th-century USA, Finn surfaces into a more socialized world but remains tied to the wheel of the central story that arguably generates heroic cycles: the threshold-crossing wheel of life that turns birth into triumph into death and (in some traditions) into birth again. The language throughout is strikingly intense, allusive, dislocatingly dreamlike, vivid.

note on covers: vol. 1 has a cover by Rowena Morrill; vols. 2 and 3 have gorgeous Mel Odom covers.