Moira’s Pen

Moira’s Pen is Megan Whalen Turner’s 2022 collection of short fiction and supplementary material from her Queen’s Thief universe, the long running fantasy series that began in 1996 with The Thief and concluded in 2020 with Return of the Thief. The series, set in a fantasy world loosely modeled on ancient Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, follows the trickster figure of Eugenides across six novels and includes some of the most carefully constructed character arcs in modern fantasy.

This collection gathers short stories, scenes, and historical fragments from the wider Queen’s Thief world, some of them written years earlier and originally published in obscure anthologies, and some of them written specifically for this volume. Moira is a goddess of writing and history in the world of the series, and the framing device for the collection imagines her pen recording the smaller moments and lesser known stories that surround the main events of the novels. The illustrations by Deena So’Oteh complement the prose and give the volume a designed quality that fans of the series will appreciate.

Megan Whalen Turner has built one of the most fiercely loyal fan bases in fantasy by writing slowly, carefully, and with a kind of structural cleverness that rewards rereading. Her novels are full of unreliable narration, hidden motivations, and twists that recontextualize what readers thought they knew. The supplementary material in Moira’s Pen is the kind of payoff that long time fans have been waiting for, with backstories and side scenes that illuminate corners of the world the main novels could not fully explore.

This is not the place to start with the Queen’s Thief series. Almost everything in the collection assumes deep familiarity with the novels, and reading these pieces first would spoil major reveals from the main books. For new readers, start with The Thief and work forward through Queen of Attolia, King of Attolia, A Conspiracy of Kings, Thick as Thieves, and Return of the Thief. Moira’s Pen is the satisfying epilogue.