Author Recommendation: Taran Matharu
Fantasy is one of the largest genres of books in the world, with hundreds of books in the genre known by everyone. From the age-old classics of Harry Potter and Narnia to the post-modern stories of Stormlight Archive and Red Rising, fantasy has a little bit of everything for everyone. Want a philosophical piece of fiction that questions the reality of what religion is and how easily humans lose faith in things, then read Elantris. Or do you want a book on how two children with the personalities of wet toast stumble upon a time-traveling tree house? Then read the magic treehouse. Want something in between the two of them? There are hundreds of thousands of books; at least one of them could catch your interest. But I get it, there are so many different authors and books that you don’t know where to begin. Well luckily, I have just the author for you to try, Taran Matharu, an up and coming British fantasy author who began writing on a fan-fiction website.
Taran Matharu has written two series: The Summoner and The Contender, but only one of them, The Summoner, is finished. The Contender is still ongoing, with three books published so far. Currently, I am reading through the Contender series so I can’t say much about the series besides it is pretty good so far. The focus of this article is mainly on his debut series, The Summoner.
The Summoner series consists of three main books and one prequel. The story is about Fletcher Wulf, a hunter and blacksmith’s apprentice living in the northern mountains of the human continent of Hominium. One day he learns he has the rare ability to summon creatures from another world known as the Ether. With this power, he attends a school made to train summoners to become Battlemages to fight in the war against the orcs in the jungles to the south. The easiest way to describe The Summoner series is the magic school elements of Harry Potter mixed with the war-torn setting of Stormlight Archives. But there is a lot more underneath that generalization. The book is filled to the brim with real-world issues told through the medium of fantasy. Matharu talks about the wealth disparity across the world, the corruption of power, and humanity’s natural paranoia at the unknown, all of these told alongside a story of war and responsibility. While the pitch I gave may have made the story sound like it takes place all within the confines of a school for the entire series, that’s not the case. Even though the first book may be about Fletcher’s year at the battlemage school, the other two books are about him in his fight against the orcs and the corruption of the human government on a much larger scale than the first book.
The thing that makes Taran Matharu such an interesting author is how he came to publish his book. Many of you may have heard of Wattpad, but in case you haven’t, Wattpad is a website focused on fans of already established media being able to write their own stories within those universes. Matharu first began writing The Summoner series, chapter-by-chapter and posting them on Wattpad. After his story gained more and more fans, an editor contacted him about the idea of publishing it as a full book. After he rewrote it and polished it, he published the first book, The Novice, to greatly positive reviews in 2015. The other two books, The Inquisition and The Battlemage were released in the two years following, with the prequel, The Outcast, being published in 2019. Taran Matharu has won a few awards and is listed as a New York Times best-selling author. If this article has captured your interest in Taran Matharu’s writing, you can find the main three books of The Summoner series in our school library and the first book of The Contender in there as well. We hope this can help a few of you find an interest in reading fantasy again and possibly even help you find your favorite author. Go Knights!
