Christopher Paolini
Christopher Paolini is an author.
Christopher Paolini is an American and Italian novelist who wrote Eragon as a teenager in Paradise Valley, Montana, and turned it into one of the biggest young-adult fantasy series of its decade. The Inheritance Cycle ran to four books, from Eragon in 2002 to Inheritance in 2011, followed by the story collection The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm in 2018 and Murtagh in 2023, the first of a follow-up duology. In 2020 he stepped sideways into science fiction with To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, a long space novel that reads as a deliberate effort not to repeat himself.
Books (10)
Where to start with Christopher Paolini
Eragon is where to start, obviously, and it is best read young: a farm boy, a dragon egg, and a plot that borrows cheerfully from everything the author had read. Eldest is the clear step up in craft. Murtagh is the most interesting book here, a return two decades later with a harder and more damaged narrator. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is the outlier, and a better novel than the series that funded it.