The Eye of the World

Jordan created the most ambitious fantasy epic in length ever published — fourteen volumes, thousands of characters, a world with its own physical and cultural rules. The first book is the promise of all that and delivers: the opening in Two Rivers, the flight, the appearance of the Aes Sedai are among the best openings in the genre. The problem, only visible later, is that the saga becomes too drawn out. But as a first volume and introduction to a first-rate imaginative universe it works.