Ranger's Apprentice

About the Ranger's Apprentice series

Will Treaty is an undersized orphan passed over for knight training and instead apprenticed, almost as an afterthought, to Halt, the taciturn and formidable head of the Ranger Corps -- the kingdom of Araluen's elite scouts, trackers, and covert protectors. Across ten novels, Will grows from a reluctant apprentice into a Ranger in his own right, fighting alongside Halt, the warrior-in-training Horace, and a widening cast of allies against invading Skandian raiders, sorcerous threats, foreign armies, and internal treachery, all while Flanagan quietly threads in a coming-of-age story about competence, loyalty, and the value of being underestimated.

John Flanagan, an Australian former advertising writer and journalist, originally wrote the first chapters as short stories to encourage his reluctant-reader son to keep reading; The Ruins of Gorlan grew out of that into the launch of a series that has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. The series closes its original run with The Lost Stories (2011), a collection of side-stories filling in moments from across the whole series rather than a single continuous narrative, after which Flanagan moved the story forward into the Royal Ranger sub-series.