Lois McMaster Bujold

A rich Komarran merchant fleet has been impounded at Graf Station in distant Quaddiespace after a bloody incident involving the convoy's Barrayaran military escort. Lord Miles Vorkosigan and his wife, Lady Ekaterin, have other things on their minds, such as getting home in time to attend the...

Captain Cordelia Naismith of the Betan Expeditionary Force was on a routine mission to study the life forms on an uninhabited, neutral planet. Little did she know that the enemy Barrayarans had chosen this place as their secret base for an as-yet undeclared war. Separated from her team, Cordelia...

Miles Vorkosigan graduates from the Barrayaran Military Academy with high expectations of ship command, but is disappointed with an assignment as meteorologist to Lazkowski Base, an arctic training camp. His tenure in the windy, snow-covered north is cut short when Miles narrowly averts a...

Lord Cazaril has been, in turn, courtier, castle-warder, and captain; now he is but a crippled ex-galley slave seeking nothing more than a menial job in the kitchens of the Dowager Provincara, the noble patroness of his youth. But Cazaril finds himself promoted to the exalted and dangerous...

Lois McMaster Bujold returns to the vivid, perilous world of her previous masterworks, the Hugo Award-winning Paladin of Souls and Hugo and World Fantasy Award-nominated The Curse of Chalion, with this tale of devotion and strange destiny. The half-mad Prince Boleso has been slain by a...

In an alternate Renaissance Italy where the church regulates magic and licenses magicians, fiery Fiametta Beneforte wants to be more than her goldsmith-mage father's unpaid apprentice. But when the Duchy of Montefoglia is laid under military and magical siege, she unexpectedly must join with...

The popular adventures of Miles Vorkosigan, a clever and outlandish science fiction hero for the modern era, continue in these three tales. In The Mountains of Mourning, Miles is dispatched to a back-country region of Barrayar, where he must act as detective, judge, and executioner in a...

Led by Admiral Naismith (a.k.a. Lord Miles Vorkosigan), the Dendarii Mercenaries have pulled off the daring interspace rescue of an entire Cetagandan POW camp. But they have made some deadly enemies. Having finally outrun the infuriated Cetagandans, the Dendarii arrive on Earth for battle...

In his 30th year, Penric fell in love with light. Learned Penric, a sorcerer and divine of the Bastard's Order, travels across the sea to sunlit Cedonia on his first covert diplomatic mission, to attempt to secure the services of a disaffected Cedonian general for the Duke of Adria. However...

Three years have passed since the widowed Dowager Royina Ista found release from the curse of madness that kept her imprisoned in her family's castle of Valenda. Her newfound freedom is costly, bittersweet with memories, regrets, and guilty secrets, for she knows the truth of what brought her...

A delightful collection of Lois McMaster Bujold's early stories and a comprehensive introduction by this New York Times best-selling author. Protozoa is a word from biology via the Greek, meaning "first animals". These short stories were indeed among the first life spontaneously generated in...