Peter Refton is a hunter of human lives. Across a score and more of Earths he has caught and captured the most fascinating and pivotal people. The knight who reformed Charlemagne's army. The bureaucrat who oversaw China's expansion and control. The inspirer of wisdom in a million seekers of understanding. Peter Refton is that most dangerous of hunters: the biographer. He has made trophy-stories of so many, and boldly carries their lives around from world to world. Then one day, a story comes to hunt his life.

Now, caught between worlds and aided by a knight, an ancestress, a sorceress and twin warriors, Peter Refton is on a Quest to free himself from the coils of the most voracious of stories: the Quest. To fight the Quest itself – and those who told the story onto him.

Exaltations is an allegorical novel about the ways the channels of stories affect human thought, and about love, faith, devotion, and the tyranny of quests, involving alternate histories and fictional realities wrapped up in a stirring adventure story.

Published
June 2009
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Author

Richard Garfinkle

Richard Garfinkle is an American writer of science fiction. He is best known as the author of Celestial Matters, a novel published by Tor Books, which was nominated for the Hugo Award and Nebula Award and won the Compton Crook Award in 1997. Richard Garfinkle is a 1992 graduate of the Clarion West Writers' Workshop and was nominated twice for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Richard Garfinkle has taught at numerous writers' workshops at the annual Chicago-area science fiction convention Windycon and at the Chicago 2000 World Science Fiction Convention.