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The Drenai series or Drenai Saga is a series of eleven heroic fantasy novels written by David Gemmell. The books are set in the fictional Drenai world first introduced in Gemmell's debut novel, Legend. While the primary focus of the series is on the Drenai people, other races including the Nadir, Ventrians, Vagrians and Nashaanites also feature prominently in the novels.

The Drenai series does not progress linearly but rather focuses on various important moments and characters over a span of many hundreds of years. Thus, the publishing order of the novels does not match the chronological order of the events depicted in the books. Often however, the main characters in one novel will be descendants or ancestors of characters from another novel, with the (intersecting and diverging) lines of Drenai Earls of Bronze and that of the Nadir Uniters providing many of the series' main characters.

Three separate sub-series, each centred around a particular protagonist, operate within the larger Drenai meta-series. The Waylander series (3 books) is chronologically the earliest and follows the life of the assassin Dakeyras, better known as Waylander. The Druss the Legend series (4 books) follow the adventures of Drenai hero Druss, introduced in Gemmell's first book. Lastly, The Damned is a subseries consisting of two novels focusing on the Nashaanite swordsman Olek Skilgannon. White Wolf, the first book of The Damned, is also considered a part of the Druss the Legend series.

Three Drenai novels – The King Beyond the Gate, Quest for Lost Heroes and Winter Warriors – do not belong to any particular subseries.

Books in the Drenai series[]

Publishing order[]

  1. Legend (1984)
  2. The King Beyond the Gate (1985)
  3. Waylander (1986)
  4. Quest for Lost Heroes (1990)
  5. Waylander II: In the Realm of the Wolf (1992)
  6. The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend (1993)
  7. The Legend of Deathwalker (1996)
  8. Winter Warriors (1996)
  9. Hero in the Shadows (2000)
  10. White Wolf (2003)
  11. The Swords of Night and Day (2004)

Chronological order[]

  1. Waylander
  2. Waylander II: In the Realm of the Wolf
  3. Hero in the Shadows
  4. The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend
  5. The Legend of Deathwalker
  6. White Wolf
  7. Legend
  8. The King Beyond the Gate
  9. Quest for Lost Heroes
  10. Winter Warriors
  11. The Swords of Night and Day
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