Start with The Last Wish, the first short-story collection. This is the one piece of Witcher advice everybody agrees on and a great many readers still get wrong, because Blood of Elves is marketed as book one of the saga and looks like the beginning. It is not. It opens on relationships — Geralt and Yennefer, Geralt and Ciri, Geralt and Dandelion — that are established entirely in the short stories, and readers who start there spend three hundred pages confused about why they are supposed to care.
Our catalogue carries the fiction chiefly as boxed sets rather than as individual volumes: Witcher Saga,8 Books Collection Set,the Last Wish and Witcher Series Andrzej Sapkowski 7 Books Collection Set Inc Sword Of Destiny are the collected editions, and buying one of them is in practice the easiest way to get the sequence in the right order at once. The individual novels did not resolve separately in our catalogue, which is a gap on our side rather than a comment on the books.
The order
- The Last Wish — short stories, mostly fairy-tale inversions. This is where Geralt, Yennefer and Dandelion are introduced and where the tone is set.
- Sword of Destiny — the second collection, and the more important of the two. Ciri arrives, and the story that gives the saga its emotional engine is here.
- Blood of Elves, Time of Contempt, Baptism of Fire, The Tower of the Swallow, The Lady of the Lake — the five-novel saga, read strictly in that order. It is one continuous story.
A publication-order wrinkle worth knowing: Sword of Destiny was published in Polish before The Last Wish, and the English editions reversed them. Read The Last Wish first anyway. It contains the frame story that introduces everyone and it is the gentler entry.
Where Season of Storms goes
Last. Season of Storms was published in 2013, long after the saga concluded, and is set between two of the early short stories. Reading it in internal-chronological position is a mistake — it was written for readers who already know how everything ends, and its pleasures are entirely in that dramatic irony. Treat it as a standalone bonus after The Lady of the Lake.
Honest warnings
The saga is not the games. The Witcher 3 is a sequel set after The Lady of the Lake, with its own Geralt and its own plot; nothing in the books requires it and nothing in it is required by the books. Coming from the games you will find the novels less action-driven, far more political, and much stranger in structure — book four in particular abandons its protagonist for long stretches.
The middle of the saga sags. Baptism of Fire is a road novel in which relatively little happens, and The Tower of the Swallow fragments its chronology in a way readers routinely find disorienting. The payoff in the final volume is worth it, but the fourth book is where people stop.
Sapkowski's prose in translation is uneven — the translators changed partway through the series — and the humour is heavily dependent on the Polish and Slavic folklore he is subverting. Some of it will not land.
Reading around the books
World of the Witcher is a compendium of setting material drawn from the games rather than the novels. It is a handsome reference and it is not canon for the fiction; read it after the saga if you want the geography, not before.
For more author-led reading orders, browse the library.
Follow the full ordered path here: The Witcher Reading Order: Stories Before Novels.
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